You can take as many precautions as possible in regards to identity theft, such as putting your mail in a locked box or shredding your credit card statements. This will not keep you from becoming victimized by the dreaded data breach, where your information gets disclosed due to a third party that possesses it not taking enough precautions.
A huge data breach just hit headlines in the past week regarding Global Payments, Inc., a payment processing vendor that works with both Visa and MasterCard. Global Payments has access to the personal information of over 10 million people who use credit and debit cards all around the world, since it partners with these traditional credit card issuers to allow merchants to accept payments.
Thanks to a hacker, over 1.5 million debit or credit card users had their personal information exposed. More specifically, a thief was able to get into Global Payments’ computer system and steal these peoples’ data through a data exportation process. At this time, it is unclear as to how this happened, and it doesn’t seem that the breached organization wants to be especially forthcoming on the matter. It’s reported that the affected customer base is limited to U.S. consumers.
There is, though speculation on how this happened. According to Avivah Litan of Gartner Reasearch, “A Central American gang broke into the company’s system by answering the application’s knowledge-based authentication questions correctly.” Doesn’t say much for the security system there.
According to ComputerWorld, Paul Garcia, CEO of Global Payments, insisted that the data that was exposed did not include the names, addresses or Social Security numbers of account holders. However, MasterCard and Visa sent information to their cardholders saying that both Track 1 data: which includes that which is mentioned above, and Track 2 data, which is more specific to the cards themselves than the users, such as account numbers and expirations dates, was stolen.
In response to the breach, Visa removed Global Payments from its list of validated service providers, but both Visa and MasterCard continue to process payments as normal. Both companies went out of their way to say that their own systems were not compromised as a result of the breach of the vendor. Not very comforting.
This is not the first breach of this type to occur. It is simply the latest. That makes it curious as to why more Americans don’t have identity theft protection plans when they know that crimes like these occur every day, all over the world. While customers are being notified about their information being compromised, it may be too late for some, or they may ignore the security warnings.
It’s advised that if you are a victim of this breach that you begin watching your credit very closely. You may even wish to cancel your card and open up a new account with a different number. This will not keep thieves from having access to information besides your credit card number and expiration date, but it is better than them having everything they need at their disposal. While your credit card company may offer free monitoring as a result of this data breach, I strongly encourage you to consider your identity theft protection options by exploring the reviews on our site.