BreachBytes

Just about every news site that tracks computing, networking or security is reporting on the Heartland Payment Systems breach. Check out this coverage from CNET. Details are still sketchy and still emerging as is always the case in early-stage data breach reporting. These things take a long time and a lot of man-hours to analyze. We will likely be hearing about this one for months on end, especially if early reporting is correct in the scope and duration of the breach.

People are suggesting that this breach could beat the TJX breach in terms of the number of credit card accounts exposed to the intruders (”unknown hackers” at this point). The sheer volume of transactions handled by Heartland (100 million a month) makes this a potentially damaging breach to many consumers.  However, the company itself does not even know as of yet how many unique cards it has processed transactions with over the year or more that the intruders were active on their network. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Breaches, Links to articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.