Evan Schuman at Storefront Backtalk is reporting that the Secret Service has identified an overseas suspect in the Heartland Payment Systems breach.
Evan also has some other updated info on the breach:
The processor first learned of the breach (when alerted by Visa and Mastercard) in late October/early November, said Heartland spokesman Jason Maloni. Previously, the only comment had been that it had been alerted in late Fall, which could have been as late as Dec. 20.
Maloni also revealed that when the sniffer software had been discovered by Heartland, the application had already been deactivated, presumably by the cyber thieves who had planted it. “It was inactive when we found it,” Maloni said.
Maloni said he didn’t more about the application’s inactive status, such as whether it had been fully terminated or whether it could have been merely dormant, programmed to awaken at some future point. If the Trojan had been deactivated, that could mean that the thieves learned they were being hunted and shut off many such applications to try and make it more difficult for investigators to discover their location.
Read more here.