TJX Companies earned an unenviable reputation in early 2007 with the data breach that compromised 45.7 million customer credit cards. But Heartland Payments Systems may well supplant the U.S. retailer as the largest victim of breach involving payment information.
This week, the New Jersey-based credit and debit card processing
services company said its systems had suffered an intrusion sometime in
2008 when malicious software was planted to steal customer card
information as it travelled through the corporate network. Heartland
said it was alerted of suspicious activity by credit card companies
Visa and MasterCard.
Heartland certainly appears to be following the usual behaviour of
corporate victims of public malicious attacks. They’re not divulging
how many credit cards may have been compromised, how long the hackers
remained undiscovered, nor when it was told by Visa and MasterCard of
suspicious activity.
But considering that Heartland processes more than 100 million card
transactions monthly, that could be a pretty good indicator as to how
many cards are at risk.
