Heartland Payment Systems is Vewy Sorry

A credit card processor called Heartland Payment Systems apparently had a security breach, affecting more than ONE HUNDRED MILLION transactions. This makes it the largest such breach in history. Here's the part of their press release I love:

"Heartland apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused," continued Baldwin. "Heartland is deeply committed to maintaining the security of cardholder data, and we will continue doing everything reasonably possible to achieve this objective."

Deeply committed, yet somehow unable to do the job. I love PR language like "everything reasonably possible," as if...these things happen. Move along people...nothing to see here...Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.

They've created a website called 2008BREACH.com to provide info. They believe the breach is now "contained." To ONE HUNDRED MILLION TRANSACTIONS.

On a completely separate totally unrelated note, all humans reading this should note that global warming is contained...to Earth.

But the good news! They're changing their logo! I'd make a joke about the way they are changing the face of payments, but it's just too easy.



The Consumerist had these things to say (two separate excerpts):

The "good" news is that the criminals were only capturing credit card numbers, the names on the cards, and expiration dates—the info encoded onto the magnetic strip on the card. Because no addresses, SSNs or PINs were stolen, the prospect of full-blown identity theft is pretty small—which must explain why Heartland isn't offering any sort of credit monitoring package as compensation. Instead, their CFO says, "We recognize and feel badly about the inconvenience this is going to cause consumers."

It's clear that Heartland is in the business of servicing other businesses, not consumers, and as such they're pretty much pretending we don't exist. The Washington Post also points out that Heartland chose an interesting day to release the news, considering there's a big Obamavent happening to provide distraction.

On that last bit, I suppose there is no better day to "take out the trash" than 1/20/2009. I hope this post helps in some small way to ensure more people see the trash in this case and (you didn't think i could entirely resist, did ya?) that "changing the future of payments" is perhaps the teeniest bit akin to Nixon claiming to "widen the war in order to narrow it."

Snark snark snark. ;-)

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.