MasterCard, Visa warn security breach may compromise data

Written by r00t on February 2, 2009 Categories: News, Sec News Tags: , ,

visa-mastercard-bigVisa and MasterCard have begun notifying member banks around the nation to contact patrons whose card accounts may have been compromised in the Heartland Payment Systems data breach.

Robert Baldwin, Heartland’s President and CFO, said in a USA TODAY interview that Visa and MasterCard are “instructing many card issuers” to offer fraud-monitoring protection, replace cards, or do a combination of both for customers whose card purchases were processed by Heartland. “We’re heartsick over this,” Baldwin said. Visa (V) and MasterCard (MA) declined to elaborate, citing an ongoing FBI criminal investigation.

Heartland disclosed Tuesday that intruders cracked the system it uses to process 100 million card transactions per month from 175,000 merchants. Heartland began investigating late last fall, tipped by Visa and MasterCard; but its tech staff was stumped. “We brought in a forensic auditor and worked for over a month, and only last week we found proof that our system had been breached,” Baldwin said. “Up to that point we had no internal data suggesting any breach.”

via HITB

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