Massive Credit Card Security Breach Grows

As reported in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many other news outlets today, payment processor Global Payments suffered a major security breach affecting both the MasterCard and Visa card brands. With the loss originally estimated at 50,000 credit and debit card accounts, that number has been recently revised upwards to a possible three million to ten million.

Global Payments in Atlanta is an intermediary between merchants and card processors. After the possible breach was reported, trading in Global Payments shares was halted.

Alerts were sent last week by the two payment processing networks to banks, warning them that a breach may have led to account information being stolen between January 21 and February 25. The most worrisome part of the loss is that the data loss comprises full Track 1 and Track 2 data, which means they have all the data they need to create new cards and fraudulent credit accounts.

Estimates of the number of lost accounts are most certainly wild guesses at this time, but if it comes down on the large side, this will be the biggest loss of personal card holder data to ever occur. There’s no information about how the breach occurred, other than it looks like it was running for about five weeks before it was discovered.

This will be in the news for a while, and will affect a lot of people.