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PCI’s Shield Suffers Another Blow As Heartland Reports a Hack

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Dissent

More on the Heartland Payment Systems breach reported earlier today…. from Digital Transactions:

[…]

Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland is one of the nation’s largest acquirers, processing for about 250,000 merchant locations. It has a number of business units, including its so-called Network Services segment serving mostly petroleum retailers that Heartland bought last year from Alliance Data Systems Corp. The malware was placed on a system for processing card transactions from about 155,000 mostly small and mid-sized business locations, many of which are restaurants. Restaurants have a comparatively high rate of data breaches, but Baldwin says the incident did not involve merchants. “This malware was designed to capture the transaction as it was being processed in our system,” he says. “This was inside our firewalls; this was not at all at a merchant location.”

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. first alerted Heartland of suspicious transactions late in the fall, according to Baldwin. The ensuing investigation did not uncover the usual suspect—a common point of purchase linking the fraud. That led to a more difficult investigation, essentially consisting of two audits, to a find common point of processing, says Baldwin. The probe finally pointed to Heartland’s system and led to the discovery of the malware. Asked when the malware was planted, Baldwin says, “we have some strong suspicions, but at this point it’s still speculative. This was a sophisticated attack.” After obtaining approvals from affected parties, Tuesday “was the earliest we could get” the news disclosed publicly, he adds.

[…]

Heartland is a non-bank acquirer that uses Cleveland-based KeyBank as its primary sponsor into the Visa and MasterCard networks. Its other sponsor is its former co-owner, St. Louis-based Heartland Bank.

Source – Digital Transactions

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