Breach exposes 40 million accounts

#85 It would seem the records keep getting broken. This has got to be the biggest (public at least) online breach in history and provide further discomfort to an already concerned public in the wake of recent high profile identity thefts.

MasterCard International on Friday said information on more than 40 million credit cards may have been stolen. Of those exposed accounts, about 13.9 million are for MasterCard-branded cards, the company said in a statement. Some 20 million Visa-branded cards may have been affected and the remaining accounts were other brands, including American Express and Discover.

The breach occurred at CardSystems Solutions in Tucson, Ariz., a third-party processor of payment data, according to a MasterCard statement. An intruder was able to use security vulnerabilities to infiltrate the CardSystems network and access the cardholder data, MasterCard said. CardSystems is one of several companies that process transactions for banks and merchants. The security breach at the company was discovered using tools that monitor for credit card fraud, MasterCard said.