Heartland Data breach may well have been one of the biggest security breaches ever perpetrated.

Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. (HPS) provides debit, prepaid, and credit card processing, online payments, check processing, payroll services as well as business solutions for small to mid-sized industries. Approximately, 40% of its clients are restaurants. HPS is the fifth largest credit card processor in the United States and the 9th largest in the world.

The breach occurred in 2008 at the Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems and may well have compromised "tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions" (Krebs; online). Revelations were announced to the public on January 20, 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration.

Heartland processed payments at the time for more than 250,000 business when it began receiving fraudulent reports from MasterCard and Visa from cards that had been used by merchants who had relied on heartland when processing...
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