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Heartland Data Breach May Well Have Been Essay

¶ … Heartland Data breach may well have been one of the biggest security breaches ever perpetrated. Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. (HPS) provides debit, prepaid, and credit card processing, online payments, check processing, payroll services as well as business solutions for small to mid-sized industries. Approximately, 40% of its clients are restaurants. HPS is the fifth largest credit card processor in the United States and the 9th largest in the world.

The breach occurred in 2008 at the Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems and may well have compromised "tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions" (Krebs; online). Revelations were announced to the public on January 20, 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration.

Heartland processed payments at the time for more than 250,000 business when it began receiving fraudulent reports from MasterCard and Visa from cards that had been used by merchants who had relied on heartland when processing payments.

Ultimately, it was discovered that the source of the breach lay in a piece of malicious software that had been inserted in the company's payment processing network and that recorded payment card data of thousands...

In August 2009, Albert Gonzalez was indicted for fabricating and organizing the fraud.
The company, however, had lost more than $12.6 million, a figure which included legal costs and fines from MasterCard and Visa (Messmer, 2009).

The Heartland fraud came close after a smattering of similar data breach securities at several other major U.S. card processors. That same year, RBS Worldpay, a branch of Citizens Financial Group Inc., disclosed that a data breach of its payment systems may have affected more…

Sources used in this document:
Krebs, B. (2009). Security Fix, The Washinton Post.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/01/payment_processor_breach_may_b.html

Messmer, E. (2009) Security breach has cost Heartland £8.4m so far. Computerworld.uk http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/14680/security-breach-has-cost-heartland-84m-so-far/?pn=2
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