Credit card hackers find new, rich targets

[rpannier]

Few noticed on Christmas Eve when the news broke that electronic payment services firm RBS WorldPay had been hit by hackers who stole personal data on 1.5 million consumers. After all, that's small potatoes these days. But when Heartland Payment Systems announced on Inauguration Day that it had suffered a serious security breach, some experts noticed a pattern -- and not just the companies' standard penchant for releasing bad news on days while the public is distracted.

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Heartland has not released an estimate of the number of accounts impacted by the attack, but Litan said it might be the biggest data leak ever: The firm handles 100 million transactions every month for 250,000 clients. Heartland has said it was alerted by Visa and MasterCard to a pattern of fraud on its networks last fall, but only discovered the security hole in its network last week . That gave hackers access to potentially hundreds of millions of transactions over several months.

The largest known data leak to date involved retailer TJ Maxx, which lost the data on 45 million credit cards in 2007. But this time, there are signs the haul, and the targets, might be astonishingly large.

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Payment processors handle credit-, debit- and gift-card transactions from the moment you swipe your card at a store until your bank debits your account and adds the money to the store's account. These are complicated processes -- the processor must make sure you have the money (or the credit limit) to afford the purchase, then tell your bank to send money to the store's bank. Often, third-party firms – such as software companies that manage store cash registers – add to the complexity.

link:
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/01/credit-card-hac.html