Largest Data Breach Disclosed During Inauguration

rmogull writes "Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn't know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and involved malicious software snooping their internal network. I've written some additional analysis on this and similar breaches. It's interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious software to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems." One bit of good news out of this massive breach is that, according to Heartland's CFO, "The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address." Heartland just put up a press release on the breach.

Comments

needess to ask what OS ..

[rs232]

Partner profile

Obvious Troll is Successful?

[mfh]

What does the inauguration have to do with this?

Nice troll! Wow.

I'll bite, since it was a really good troll you posted.

To answer your question, the best magician does his dirty tricks when everyone's attention is fixed on a good distraction. What better way to hammer into a site and steal all kinds of info when everyone is staring at a TV?

I would be actually somewhat surprised if this was the only major crime committed today.

Nothing to do with the inauguration

[Geoffrey.landis]

Yeah, that was my take on it-- that "inauguration" headline has nothing to do with the actual story, and the data breach has nothing whatsoever to do with the inauguration. The inauguration is just there because, hey, all the news stories today have to mention it. It's, like, a rule or something.

I don't think it's a rule that slashdot article summaries have to mention the inauguration even if it's not relevant to the story, though. Can't somebody here look at who wrote the summary and moderate them -1 irrelevant?