Was Your Personal Data Stolen???

By Eric Dash and Brad Stone for the New York Times
Heartland Payment Systems, a major payment processing company, disclosed a data breach on Monday that potentially exposed tens of millions of credit and debit cardholders to the risk of fraud in what could quickly become one of the country’s biggest data compromises.
Robert H. B. Baldwin Jr., Heartland’s president and chief financial officer, said that his company believed the card numbers, expiration dates, and in some cases cardholder names were exposed after attacks on its computer systems at the one point where data had been unencrypted.
Once consumers swiped their cards, so-called sniffer software captured that data as Heartland sought authorization from the major payment companies and banks. Customers of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover Financial were all vulnerable.
“We have industry-leading encryption, but the data has to be unencrypted to request the information,” Mr. Baldwin said. “The sniffer was able to grab that authorization data at that point.”
Data thieves introduced the software as early as May, but Heartland did not detect the breach until it was alerted to the activity in late fall. The personal data of 600 million or more cardholders was vulnerable, but data security experts suggested data from far fewer accounts had been extracted. Other confidential information, like personal security codes, is not believed to have been compromised. That might limit damages.