St. Louis-based Heartland Payment announced yesterday that hackers gained access to the machines it uses to process roughly 100 million credit card transactions every month. The company handles transactions for 175,000 separate businesses and bills itself as having "the highest standards" and "the most trusted transactions." Despite that, the company has no idea how long its systems were being monitored, saying only that it was "longer than weeks."

Because of this nobody knows just how many cards were compromised, but given the sheer volume of cards that are processed, many are already calling this the largest data breach in history. Until they're able to figure out just who was affected, Mastercard and Visa are now warning all cardholders and banks to watch out for suspicious activity, even if they may not have been affected.

If there's some good news it's that only credit card numbers were nabbed, not addresses, so exposure should be somewhat limited. But regardless, the cost of sending millions of letters and millions of replacement cards will surely be massive, and given current economic conditions we're not sure just where all that money will come from.

oh crap

Uh-oh.

I can't remember what I was going to say......

I keep hopin someone will steal my identity

it could only improve my credit

my aunt used to live in nevada and at xmas she had told me that her doc records were hacked into a week before and they got her info. so she doesnt have a bank account for that reason anymore

Ha!