Massive Credit Card Breach Was On Data That Wasn't Supposed To Exist

from the who-can-we-blame? dept

Late Friday afternoon, MasterCard released the news about how potentially 40 million credit card holders were at risk of having their data stolen, after discovering a hacker had placed a trojan on the computers of a credit card processing company. That was scary enough, but as the details continued to come out over the weekend, the situation just seemed to get worse and worse. Jeremy Wagstaff notes that the processor in question, CardSystems, apparently knew about the breach for nearly a month but claimed they didn’t say anything because the FBI asked them not to — a charge that the FBI denies. Then comes the best part. The NY Times reports that CardSystems wasn’t even supposed to have this data. The company processes credit card transactions, but isn’t supposed to keep records of the transactions, as per agreements it signed with Visa and MasterCard. However, these days, when it seems to be common practice to play fast and loose with other people’s data, CardSystems hung onto all the data, for its own “research” purposes. It looks like those research purposes just caused plenty of problems for an awful lot of people.


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Comments on “Massive Credit Card Breach Was On Data That Wasn't Supposed To Exist”

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4 Comments
Precision Blogger (user link) says:

Securiy by volutary compliance

What’s REALLY interesting is that the banks make security policy and then trust the processing companies to follow it. These records might not have existed if the the banks had been actively auditing the procesing companies instead of telling them what they were supposed to do and leaving it at that.
– Precision Blogger

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