Forty million credit cards of all brands might have been exposed to fraud through a security breach at a third-party payment processing company, MasterCard International reported Friday in a statement. About 13.9 million of the potentially exposed cards are MasterCard-branded cards.
MasterCard said its team of security experts identified that the breach occurred at Arizona-based CardSystems Solutions, Inc., which processes transactions on behalf of financial institutions and merchants.
“Working with all parties, including issuing banks, acquiring banks, the processor and law enforcement, MasterCard immediately launched an investigation into the breach, and worked with CardSystems to remediate the security vulnerabilities in the processor’s systems,” MasterCard said. “These vulnerabilities allowed an unauthorized individual to infiltrate their network and access the cardholder data.”
However, CardSystems reported Friday that it identified a potential security incident on May 22 and on May 23 contacted the FBI, then the Visa and MasterCard associations. In addition, CardSystems said that it immediately engaged an independent 3rd party to validate systems security.
On the web: http://www.mastercardinternational.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.cgi?id=1038
http://www.cardsystems.com/news.html.
(via MasterCard International)
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