Heartland Payment Systems Data Breach

Heartland Payment Systems of NJ announced (during the presidential inauguration) that they have experienced a data security breach that may well be the largest in US history. Although no one has specified an exact number of records compromised, the fact that they process about 100 million credit cards each month means the number will be high.

Heartland said that they believe this to be the work of a criminal organization. Malware that acted as a “sniffer” (capturing data) was found on an unallocated portion of the disk according to: http://www.storefrontbacktalk.com/securityfraud/heartland-sniffer-hid-in-unallocated-portion-of-disk/ and was missed by a couple of different forensic teams initally.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10146275-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1009_3-0-20

A class-action lawsuit has also been filed. Detail can be found at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10151961-83.html