January 20, 2009, will forever be known as the day the U.S. inaugurated its first African-American President, Barack Obama. However, buried deep in the headlines of the day, it was announced that the largest data security breach in U.S. history occured by Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. The amount of loss and damages, it is estimated to be over 100 million cards are effected, will far exceed the January 2007 data breach by TJX Companies. Heartland is a Princeton, NJ-based provider of debit and credit card processing services, and in its release, stated that unknown intruders had broken into its systems sometime last year and planted malicious software to steal card data carried on the company’s networks. When alerted to the suspicious activity by Visa and MasterCard, Heartland investigated the intrusion and believe it to be a part of a wider global cyberfraud operation.
The Heartland intrusion is the second major compromise involving a large payment processor in the past few weeks. On December 23, RBS WorldPay, Inc., the payment processing division for the Royal Bank of Scotland announced it had been breached by intruders resulting in the compromise of personal information belonging to about 1.5 million cardholders. These incidents suggest that cybercrooks are increasingly beginning to target payment processing companies, because of the very nature of its business purpose. Radical security measures need to be taken by companies to protect against the release of unauthorized information. Forget the looming class action litigation costs that are being solicited by the Pennsylvania-based law firm of Chimicles & Tikellis, the costs associated with responding to a breach can be overwhelming. Having a crisis management plan in place can help a business respond in a rapid manner more efficiently, and deliberately.
To view more about the Heartland data breach, please click here: Heartland Data Breach Could Be Bigger Than TJX’s