Rmogull writes "Brian Krebs over at the regimentation Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn't know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and elaborate malicious windows snooping their centralized network. I've written some auxiliary dissection on this and similar breaches. It's interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious ms-dos to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems." One bit of good news out of this massive breach is that, by the book to Heartland's CFO, "The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are in truth quite tough for the bad guys to do because one piece of news we know they did not get was an address." Heartland just put up a press release on the breach.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mark