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Up To 1.5 Million Visa, MasterCard Credit Card Numbers Stolen
An anonymous reader writes "Global Payments, the U.S.-based credit card processor company that experienced a security breach affecting Visa and MasterCard, confirmed that the breached portion of its processing system was confined to North America. The company also finally revealed how many credit card numbers were stolen: around 1,500,000."
The numbers are still there, man, it's, like, totally just a bunch of bits and bytes and junk.
Or do we only apply that argument to music and movies and porn, hmm?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Nothing was stolen. They made a copy of a file or files that contained the credit card numbers. The company still has their copy of those numbers so they haven't actually lost anything.
So at most this is what? copyright infringement?
Am I not looking after my finances when I entrust them to (and pay handsomely for) banks to look after them?
Either through interest payments or transaction fees, we are paying a small fortune to multi-billion dollar corporations who want us to use their products so they can make even more money. Why should they be permitted to supply a product but not required to make sure it's reasonably secure?
Many of us are making almost every transaction by card these days - effectively paying banks something like 2.5% of our take-home salary to provide the service that they do. And as we use it more, manual auditing of small transaction values becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
Even if it takes 20 minutes a month to check each transaction, that's 4 hours a year for 200 million plus in the US alone, or getting close to one billion hours of lost time each year. That's crazy.