MasterCard, Visa Warn of Cardholder Data Breach

by The Associated Press Mar 30th 2012 2:55PM
Updated Mar 30th 2012 3:11PM
Visa and Mastercard dataNEW YORK (AP) - MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) said Friday that they had notified issuers of its credit cards of a potential breach of the security of customer accounts. Visa blamed a third company for the error.

Trading of the stock of Global Payments Inc., which processes credit card transactions, was halted after published reports said it was responsible. The stock fell 9 percent for the day before trading was stopped.

Global Payments did not respond to requests for comment, and Visa would not name the company it believed was to blame. Neither Visa nor MasterCard would say how many customers were affected.

Credit card companies generally protect customers against fraudulent transactions, and Visa said specifically Friday that its U.S. customers were not at risk. Both Visa and MasterCard said their own systems had not been compromised.

Last June, hackers stole information for 360,000 credit card accounts at Citigroup (C). In the past year, there have been high-profile data attacks against the International Monetary Fund, National Public Radio, Google (GOOG) and Sony (SNE)'s PlayStation Network.

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Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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3 Comments

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zzyxx

people have to start losing their jobs for this info getting unloaded into the criminal hands. start with the muckadie mucks and work your way down.

March 31 2012 at 10:26 PM Report abuse +2 rate up rate down Reply
sflacopper

JP Morgan Chase didn't tell us jack sh*t! As a matter of fact they refused to cancel and close my account(s) after I alerted them that my account had been breached and that two $3,000 transactions from Kuwait were posted against my Miami account. It's obvious that they are oblivious ... and that their left hands are not in sync with their right, I went to my Chase branch today and they still were unaware of the security breaches. My money is now in a credit union. Screw chase.

March 31 2012 at 5:41 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
jdykbpl45

Really? These folks are Obama's fat cat friends.

March 30 2012 at 7:03 PM Report abuse +3 rate up rate down Reply