19,000 Brit's have credit card info posted on Google

The credit card details of up to 19,000 British shoppers were published on the internet - where they could be found using a simple search on Google.

The details apparently originated from the website of a criminal gang in the Far East.

The list, obtained by the Mail, includes the names, home addresses and full card details of thousands of Visa, Mastercard and American Express customers.

It is believed the details were originally on an unsecured server in Vietnam which was linked to a website belonging to the fraudsters. Criminal gangs typically use such websites to trade in stolen card details.

The server was closed down in February by authorities investigating cyber crimes but Google's powerful indexing technology had already located the list and made a copy.

Rik Ferguson, of web security firm Trend Micro, said: 'To find this amount of data on a server which is publicly accessible is a rare event. Organised crime usually protect their ill-gotten gains behind password-protected links on encrypted machines.

An Australian IT industry worker discovered the details by mistake via a security hole within Google, where pages of defunct websites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone.

The IT worker, who chose to remain anonymous, told iTnews: “I received a Google Alert for a name. The alert started with a bunch of other numbers, so I went to the web page and it was just a virtual directory listing with a bunch of directories underneath and a load of files inside.