U.S. federal authorities have indicted five men — four Russians and a Ukrainian – for allegedly perpetrating many of the biggest cybercrimes of the past decade, including the theft of more than 160 million credit card numbers from major U.S. retailers, banks and card processors.
Debit card accounts stolen in a recent hacker break-in at card processor Global Payments have been showing up in fraud incidents at retailers in Las Vegas and elsewhere, according to officials from one bank impacted by the fraud.
At the beginning of March 2012, Danbury, Conn. based Union Savings Bank began seeing an unusual pattern of fraud on a dozen or so debit cards it had issued, noting that most of the cards had recently been used at a cafe at a nearby private school. When the bank determined that the school was a customer of Global Payments, it contacted Visa to alert the card association of a possible breach at the Atlanta-based processor, according to Doug Fuller, Union Savings Bank’s chief risk officer.
A hacker break-in at credit and debit card processor Global Payments Inc. dates back to at least early June 2011, Visa and MasterCard warned in updated alerts sent to card-issuing banks in the past week. The disclosures offer the first additional details about the scope of the breach since Global Payments acknowledged the incident on March 30, 2012.
Global Payments Inc., the Atlanta-based credit and debit card processor that recently announced a breach that exposed fewer than 1.5 million card accounts, held a conference call this morning to discuss the incident. Unfortunately, that call created more questions than… Read More »
Global Payments, the credit and debit card processor that disclosed a breach of its systems late Friday, said in a statement late Sunday that the incident involved at least 1.5 million accounts. The news comes hours ahead of planned conference call with investors, and after Visa said it had pulled its seal of approval for the company.
In a press release issued 9:30 Sunday evening, Atlanta based Global Payments Inc. said it believes “the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported…Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained. ”
VISA and MasterCard are alerting banks across the country about a recent major breach at a U.S.-based credit card processor. Sources in the financial sector are calling the breach “massive,” and say it may involve more than 10 million compromised card numbers.
