Security Breach Exposes 40M Credit Cards

The Good Reverend writes "MasterCard International announced today that a security breach at CardSystems Solutions, a third party processor of payment card data, potentially exposed more than 40 million cards. Mastercard is aware of the specific card numbers affected, and is giving its member financial institutions the numbers that may have been compromised. Unlike many of the past high profile cases this one involves a hacker rather than lost packages. CNN Money, the New York Times, Reuters, MSNBC, ZDNet, C|Net, and the Washington Post are also covering the story."

Comments

What I would like to see

[Timesprout]

since people here (Ireland) and the UK are basically being encouraged to rack up debt is some one to crack Mastercard/Visa and wipe out all the amounts owed on credit cards. Might encourage the financial institution to be a little less carefree with their lending policies.

This is simply the price of outsourcing.

[0xdeaddead]

See in the banking industry we run these "penetration scans" all the time, that are TOTALY WORTHLESS. I cannot emphasize this enough, that running the weakest setup possbile will pass their "tests" with flying colours. The people doing these tests (Some certified security specialists!) Think that firewalls are magical devices that know how to stop the pesky hackers. Bottom line is that people are involved, they are out of their element, and simply placeholders. Management in general needs to get out of this "placerholder" mentality when it comes to jobs, and just fire people that are not doing their jobs.

Ok enough ranting, but trust me, in the late 90s banks were trying to outsource as many things as possible from customer service, to invoicing, bills, credit collections, applications and so on. As you can see when the "Credit card company" becomes nothing more than a brand, and a board of execs, everything is out of their control, not to mention every peice of the old credit empire is open for attack.....

If anything the question is why did it take so long to find them?!

Weakest link

[hellfire]

It's not surprising someone other than MasterCard actually had a list of card numbers stolen. I have customers all the time tell me how they don't like what they feel are draconian measures to protect the credit card numbers people have in their own systems. What they fail to understand is that Visa and Mastercard require us to do this, and the protections we have are customer service.

But they still complain, because their customers and they themselves don't ever notice. Hell at one point I was told by a demanding customer to remove the protections because he said "I'll risk it." I was tempted to show him how insecure he was by remotely accessing his system, getting his list of customer phone numbers, and telling all his customers that he was careless with credit card numbers and their numbers could have easily been stolen from his system.

People are pretty careless about credit card security. It's usually in the name of convenience and visible customer service. Credit card security is invisible service. Being able to purchase something conveniently flies right in the face of having security which just might prevent you from selling something to someone, so some people don't care, as long as they are selling. Owners care once they find out that they'll be issued chargebacks, but individual salesreps will write down every credit card number on a piece of paper if it means making money for them personally.

Visa and Mastercard have the right idea, and in the press release I like how they said that they gave cardsystems a "limited amount of time" to basically get their act together so this doesn't happen again. Education and enforcement of regulations... nice to see an organization, especially one that is a corporation, actually give a damn.