40 Million Credit Files Placed at Risk

Mastercard International admitted yesterday that 40 million credit card accounts have been compromised via a security breach at a payment processing company. The company where this occurred at was CardSystems Solutions of Tuscon, Arizona.

Approximately 20 million Visa account holders and 13.9 million Mastercard account holders were compromised. The remainder were American Express and Discover accounts. This was done when a computer code or script was placed on the CardSystems network that made it possible to steal information.

The FBI has initiated an investigation. More details can be obtained by clicking on the title, which links the article from the New York Times.

Already, the press in Canada is alarmed that Canadian citizens could be at risk also. In fact, with that much information, the issue could be global.

In recent times, there have been an ongoing series of these data thefts. Recently, I have covered some of these in other posts. Here are a couple of them:

http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2005/05/identity-theft-at-investigative-agency.html

http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2005/05/rumor-of-increased-sophistication-in.html

In these recent mass thefts of customer information, more often than not, the criminals were not very sophisiticated. Our laws are far too lenient on these types of crimes and the time is now for large corporations entrusted with people's personal data to be held accountable for their apparent lack of security.

There is pending legislation in both the United States and the United Kingdom to give the laws more bite.

Here is a previous post on that matter:

http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2005/05/spyware-bill-approved-by-house-of.html

Contained in this article is a link where you can contact your political representatives and let them know how you feel!