MasterCard and Visa hit with biggest hack ever
June 17, 2005 by Mike Wendland
The credit card numbers of 40 million Americans have been hacked. The number is staggering.
But what’s worse is that it happened late last year and is only now being confirmed. There’s no evidence of fraudulent charges from the electronic break in.
Yet.
It apparently involved the secret implantation of zombie code on the computers used by a Tucson company to manage credit card numbers for MasterCard and Visa. That code allowed the hacker access to the numbers.
40 Million Credit Card Numbers Hacked
Now I know how my identity was stolen in March and my MasterCard showed unauthorized charges for plane tickets in Spain. How much longer must we wait until some Government agency does something about these increasing security issues?
Victim of ID Theft: What kind of government intervention could have prevented this? Theft is already illegal. The company that was hacked was not supposed to be keeping the card numbers anyway. That violates their terms of service with MC & Visa, probably, but maybe not the law.
Still, if it were against the law, what would happen? Would you be compensated? No, the company that was hacked would pay a fine to the government. How are you helped there?
The law already protects you and me as cardholders. We are not liable for more than $50 in unauthorized charges. Many banks waive that?especially in an instance like this where it was not your fault.
The new “government agency” that you appear to be proposing would cost us untold billions more as taxpayers and card holders. What happened to you is terrible and I hope the perps are brought to justice. But more government regulation is not the answer here.
Nobody said we need a new Government agency. All that needs to be done is these companies need to either pay hefty fines or be completely shut down when something of this magnitude happens. This could involve a new law and not a new agency. Some may think that’s unrealistic but trust me you won’t feel the same if you have your identity stolen. While them paying a huge fine won’t help the problem that has already happened, it may make other companies think twice about being ho-hum with security related issues. I am seriously getting sick and tired of these data warehouse companies having a security breach and xx million people are affected and the response is usually “We apologize for the inconvenience…” That isn’t enough for me and it shouldn’t be enough for anyone else either. Point blank, they need to be held responsible far more than they are now.