Company That Had The Largest Ever Credit Card Data Breach… Apparently Breached Again [Update]

from the hits-you-in-the-heartland dept

Remember Heartland Payment Systems? It’s the giant credit card clearinghouse that was involved in the largest ever security breach in terms of the number of credit card numbers exposed. They were successfully targeted by the same guys who had also set the previous record for largest credit card data breach, so you could question whether the issue was just a sophisticated group of hackers or poor security at Heartland (or, possibly, a combination of both). Either way, it looks like Heartland may still have some issues. Carlo sends over the news that a new security breach has been discovered at a restaurant in Austin, Texas that appears to involve someone hacking into the network between the restaurant and Heartland. It’s not yet clear if this goes beyond that one restaurant, but this can’t look good for Heartland.

Update: Heartland got in touch to let us know that this appears to be an issue outside of Heartland’s system, and that Heartland is not the target of the investigation into the breach. Heartland’s press release is basically pointing out that the weakness was with the restaurant’s credit card security, not its own.

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Companies: heartland payment systems

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Comments on “Company That Had The Largest Ever Credit Card Data Breach… Apparently Breached Again [Update]”

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11 Comments
Ed C says:

Re: Security Breach Again!

What I think is unreasonable is that with all of the money Heartland gets from handling financial transactions and information, that it can’t even be bothered to insure their security. The business is founded on the trust that they can be handled security, and that trust has been broken. Any lose of business that results from these breaches is the lest they deserve.

Anonymous Coward says:

Somebody else's fault?

Details are scarce in these reports, but it looks as if the numbers were going through the network in the clear. At what point in the chain did Heartland first have the ability to encrypt them with Heartland’s public key?

If they were intercepted before this point, then I think Heartland was not to blame…

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