February 19,2009
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News: Growing Heartland Heist Investigation.
Hopefully, the recent arrest of the three stooges of Tallahassee; Tony, Jeremy and Timothy is just the crack in the door that conceals the real masterminds of the recent Heartland heist of 100 million credit card profiles. The greatest significance of these arrests may be in the interrogations. According to the Leon County Sheriff's Office, these stolen credit card profiles were acquired through "dark on-line chat rooms." It is hoped that the demented masterminds were less savvy in covering their ‘electronic footprints' than they were in hacking Heartland's network. Apparently, they discovered a ‘weak link' in Heartland's, otherwise, very robust "encryption chain". Encryption chains are links that join vital information, such as credit card info, between software procession packages.
The fact that Heartland contracts with a quarter million different merchant accounts and merges their transactions with hundreds of millions of credit card accounts, almost randomly issued by hundreds of credit card issuers, attests to the complexity of Heartland's networks. Until the punishment reaches a deterrent severity level, diabolical masterminds will continue to flourish under cover of these now, third world soviet-block fragments. Hopefully, these narrowly focused mis-fits aren't as savvy with forensics as they are at breaking in. "Follow the crumbs on the floor". Credit cards have become the fluid of sustenance right now. We must protect this vital life-blood that billions of world citizens depend on. We must go after these fiends with a vengeance.
As far as we know, the Heartland breach occurred during November of last year. Heartland, themselves, only became aware after the VISA and MasterCard associations alerted them of a large ‘suspicious blanket' formed over the credit card transactions they were submitting. Several forensic auditors were immediately brought in to investigate the issue. What they found was that, "malicious software had compromised data crossing Heartland's network". They had discovered a tiny ‘crack' in the ‘encryption flow'. Since then, Heartland has taken a number of steps to better secure its systems. Heartland is also implementing next-generation software that will flag future network anomalies in real-time. This will enable law enforcement to expeditiously snag these ‘cyber scums'.