Kevin Albright - Product Marketing Manager

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about last week’s breach at Heartland Payment Systems. The number of total records compromised has not yet been released, but given California’s SB 1386 we should be hearing some sort of estimate soon. What is known is that Heartland has contacted 150,000 merchants that it processes payments for and it handles roughly 100 million credit card and debit card transactions per month. Given that this breach is suspected of starting in October 2008, the quick and dirty math should give you a rough estimate of how big this breach is…Huge! Already companies have been contacting customers, issuing new cards, and we are all put on alert to watch our credit card and debit card statements in the coming months.

The interesting thing about this breach is that Heartland was PCI compliant, and that the nature of this breach fell within the rules of the PCI-DSS v1.2...