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Heartland Announces Massive Data Breach on Inauguration Day
Posted on Jan 20, 2009 by Tom Fragala
Heartland Payment Systems announced today, on the morning of Obama's inauguration, what appears to be a colossal data breach of credit card numbers. A coincidence they announced it today?
The number of compromised credit card accounts in unknown and was not addressed in the announcement. However, HPS processes a staggering 4 BILLION transactions each year.
More from SC Magazine
Leading credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems announced on Tuesday that it has suffered an apparent massive data breach.
The Princeton, N.J.-based company said it discovered last week that intruders loaded data-capturing malware onto its systems, allowing them to compromise credit and debit card numbers as they traversed the network, Heartland said in a statement.
The company, which provides processing and payment solutions to more than 250,000 companies, did not reveal how many card numbers potentially were exposed to hackers. But Heartland handles more than four billion transactions each year, according to its website. No Social Security or PIN numbers were involved.
Filed under: Data Breach
Comments
Sandra Jean on Jan 23, 2009
This company has excellent customer service, no contracts or cancellation fees,very reasonable rates, AND HAS NEVER HAD A SECURITY BREACH. As a business owner, I have never had any issues with them, and plan on keeping them as my processor for a very long time. My sales rep was Danielle at (877) 877-9592.
Ishan on Feb 8, 2009
It is really sad to see that so many data breach reports are coming everyday. This is despite the fact that data breach is a federal offense. I am not sure why the companies are still not doing enough to ensure security of consumer's data.
One fact that I was most scared to read about is that more than 9 million Americans are impacted by Identity Theft every year. And a big reason for that is people still do not fully understand What exactly Identity Theft is. Most of the people still think that Identity Theft means stealing someone's Social Security Number. But that's not true, and Identity Theft has a much wider scope. I wrote a small article to explain What Exactly Identity Theft is.
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