January 21, 2009
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News: I Smell A Rat, Sniffing.
It appears that mal-ware maggots (or rats, if you prefer) have struck again. The data tells us that Heartland services about contracts about "250,000 US businesses". What does this mean to the average credit card holder? Well, consider the process that takes place. In the industry, our credit card charges are collected by businesses (merchants). Typically, each of those charges will be stored by the services of a submittal service for each given merchant. At day's end, this submittal service will submit the day's transactions to a Front-end Processor who will sort out all the data according to it's nature and destination. At this time, a quick risk assessment is made and, usually, the merchant gets paid on good faith that the transactions are legitimate. The sorted-out data is then forwarded on to a Back-end processor. These processed transactions then filter through the various CC agencies, like VISA and MC and go out to the proper lending institutions to collect payment as the charges are applied to each credit card holder's account.
Heartland are in the middle of all this. So, even though they have 250.000 business clients, each of these businesses may have hundreds of thousands of their own credit card clients, who are you and I. If you multiply 250,000 businesses times hundreds of credit card holders each, you can see the scope of how big the this whole incident can be.
With that said, it's important to point out that this kind of theft is considered to be lower-grade credit card information. What this means is that, without more information then is reported to have been compromised, the stolen information is worth much less to the thief. The information that was not stolen is what would have been the worst threat. This information would be things like CVV2 codes, PINs, SSNs, address info and personal information like ‘your mother's maiden name'.