Visa: There is No New Data Breach

Recent Alerts Relate to Older, Pre-Heartland Investigation
Visa: There is No New Data Breach
Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) may be the only "new" data breach, after all.

A week after at least two banking institutions and a state banking association reported a new data breach that had been announced to them by Visa, the credit card company now is saying that its recent alerts to card issuers were actually part of an existing investigation and aren't "related to a new compromise event." Heartland Payment Systems data breach coverage

In its statement issued on Friday, Visa says it "has provided the affected accounts to financial institutions so they can take steps to protect consumers. In addition, Visa is risk-scoring all transactions in real-time, helping card issuers better distinguish fraud transactions from legitimate ones."

Visa did not name the entity that was breached - and gave no reason for the continued anonymity.

Heartland Update

In developments in the Heartland case, a Philadelphia law firm filed a class action lawsuit against the processor on behalf of two banks and three credit unions. The complaint was filed by Chimicles & Tikellis in U.S. District Court in Trenton, NJ on February 20.

The five institutions named in the complaint are Amalgamated Bank, New York, NY; Matadors Community Credit Union, Chatsworth, CA; GECU, El Paso, TX; MidFlorida Federal Credit Union, Lakeland, FL; and Farmers State Bank, Marcus, IA. All the institutions say they have had to re-issue "substantial" numbers of credit and debit cards because of the Heartland breach.

While there is no official accounting how many institutions, cards or consumers are involved in the Heartland breach, more than 565 institutions have made public that their customers' cards were compromised by the Heartland breach, which was first announced on Jan. 20.


About the Author

Linda McGlasson

Linda McGlasson

Managing Editor

Linda McGlasson is a seasoned writer and editor with 20 years of experience in writing for corporations, business publications and newspapers. She has worked in the Financial Services industry for more than 12 years. Most recently Linda headed information security awareness and training and the Computer Incident Response Team for Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), a subsidiary of the NYSE Group (NYX). As part of her role she developed infosec policy, developed new awareness testing and led the company's incident response team. In the last two years she's been involved with the Financial Services Information Sharing Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), editing its quarterly member newsletter and identifying speakers for member meetings.




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