I heard about this in my credit union when cashing my pay check, it sounds pretty bad, so I'm passing it along.

Credit card numbers estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been stolen. This is due to a credit processing company called Global Payments being compromised. The company found out they were hacked in early March (why are we just barely hearing about this?) and they haven't released how much information has been stolen just that "card data may have been accessed" (nice corporate two-step there ) The hacking therefore probably took place either some time in February or the very beginning of March, some are saying transaction information as early as January 21st may be compromised.

You can read more about it here:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/30/technology/credit-card-data-breach/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577313411294908868.html

So keep a very close eye on your credit and debit transactions to make sure nothing fishy is going on. Also tell other people you know so they are aware.

Edit: This does not appear to effect people outside the US, though if you used a credit card either online with a US company or on vacation here any time this year yours may have been compromised.

Fox news quoted Mastercard claiming over 10 million compromised.

Credit card companies disgust me. I will never get a credit card. I'm glad Obama passed that law that puts some restriction on the credit card companies.

Geez... when will these companies learn that if you're going to keep a database of personal data, you damn well better protect it.

They'd rather spend their money on how to con their customers with interest rates up the ass.

It's not like these breaches don't affect them though.

Then how would you ever get a credit rating which is needed to buy things like a house?

It's actually going to be a very interesting case as this unravels. Either Global Payments was PCI-DSS compliant (in which case it's the first official time a PCI-DSS compliant company has leaked information, though not particularly surprising) or they weren't (in which case bye-bye Global Payments. They'll be wiped off the board by the Payment Card Industry)

It's every credit and debit card. The company was a processing company (basically a middle man) so it's not card-specific.

That svcks

Is it somewhat safe to assume that the offender is based in the continent of Asia?

What I'd like to know is, why were they holding onto this information in the first place? I would think that once they perform a transaction, they should delete any data involved. (Or at least sensitive bits like card numbers.)

There's regulations on when transactional information can be deleted. It's also possible that the information was stolen as it was being processed. The length and even the exact day of the breach still hasn't been announced and Global Payments processes countless transactions every day. Last year for just MasterCard and Visa they processed $120.6 billion.

I find it funny that a company like this does little to nothing to protect themselves when a company like Facebook (where you don't have to have any sensitive info if you don't want to) openly asks people to attempt to hack them (far a cash prize no less)

Negligence at it's finest.

Indeed. Is it too late to enter this company in that "Worst businesses of 2012" poll?

Security through obscurity (which we all know is not security at all) is very popular in the financial and health sectors.

you said it, any company that handles money on the internet is not obscure.

Beat me to it.

Companies like Facebook that everybody knows are probably more prepared because they have more reason to expect a hack. I'd never even heard of this company before.

Well, of course I don't like this one bit, but it's not all that shocking. I'm surprised it hasn't happened on this scale before now...or more often.

There may indeed be some company negligence in there (we'll have to wait and see) but there's currently no such thing as "100% hackproof" electronic data.

There's been big breaches before, but this is the biggest one in some time, potentially the biggest period. Since Global Payments still hasn't been exactly forthcoming about details yet, it's still not known the extent of the breach.

*nods*

Nothing can be consider ultimately safe and people will always try to break into secure places to get what they want. Only problem with digital data is putting it on connection that has an outside line means ANYONE can get it not just the people in the local neighborhood.

How can you possibly get away with a crime this big...?

IMO, it's pretty hard to get through life without credit these days, unless you're dependent on someone else (who has credit)

Bouncing your way through a botnet spread over several countries is a start. Using someone else's wifi (shared publicly or not) with a spoofed MAC address makes you even harder to catch.

Right... As you're taking in a hell of a lot of money... It will get suspicious