Largest Cyber Crime Evah Nets 100 Million Credit Cards

In what could be the largest ever cybersecurity breach, Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that an attacker had installed some malware on their internal network that siphoned off 100 Million credit card transactions.

It took the Secret Service Agency along with a team of cyber security forensic specialists to uncover the software.  Heartland claimed that they were duped by geniuses far beyond the mortal ken of human hackers by declaring in this Wall Street Journal article here:

Heartland was targeted with malicious software that was “light-years more sophisticated” than malevolent programs commonly downloaded from the Internet.

“Light Years” more sophisticated?  What did they use, a Jedi Mind trick to exfiltrate the data or just a normal program that sniffed the wire, bundled the data,and shipped it off?  I’m going to go with the latter.  And the fact that Heartland couldn’t tell that this much data was escaping is more an indication that they are likely “light years” behind the state of the art for internal security solutions.

I posted the whole story on this over at GeeksareSexy here so you should check it out.  Bottom line is that if you ate at a local owned restaurant in the past few months, you need to keep an eye on your credit card bill for suspicious charges.