Biggest data breach ever at Heartland Payment Systems – 100 million transactions at risk

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Although we’ve seen some whoppers in the UK, you can always count on the Yanks to do things bigger and better. One payment processing company, the brilliantly-named “Heartland Payment Systems” processes transactions for a quarter of a million businesses in the USA and has found some monitoring software on its servers, sending data to an external machine.

“We found evidence of an intrusion last week and immediately notified federal law enforcement officials as well as the card brands. We understand that this incident may be the result of a widespread global cyber fraud operation, and we are cooperating closely with the United States Secret Service and Department of Justice.” said Heartland president Robert Baldwin

In the USA, unlike the UK, companies have to disclose when data breaches occur. It’ll be interesting to see if Europe implements a similar law, but the UK government is opposed to such a move.

(via Out-Law.com)

Related posts: WPA Wi-Fi security gets cracked | Security watchdog the ICO is currently looking at 277 “data breaches” in the UK

Finally, iPhone US launch date announced: Friday 29th June

Those who haven’t been attending the iPhone pre-launch party (and why not? Don’t tell me you don’t care) may not be aware quite how many rumours have been surrounding the date that Apple’s first smartphone will launch in the US.

While Apple rumours are nothing unusual, iPhone hype has been so strong that it seems as if every day in June has had a believable reason attached for Apple dropping the iPhone into AT&T stores.

Admittedly, journalist’s cousins overhearing junior AT&T staff talking about a release date isn’t hugely confidence building, but it hasn’t stopped the stories being published.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of reiterating what the title of this article has already made perfectly clear: Apple has officially announced the day that the iPhone will be available to buy in the States.

Friday 29th June.