Global Payments, a publicly traded payment processing company, recently announced that they had identified unauthorized access into their processing systems resulting in the compromise of as many as 1.5 million credit cards. In response Visa revoked Global Payments’ status as being PCI compliant, although the company is still processing Visa and other card transactions.
Global Payments announced that their systems had been compromised on Friday March 30th, but Visa and MasterCard began notifying card issuers about a possible breach involving a then unnamed card processor earlier in the week. Global Payments identified the breach in early March and according to their CEO it is now contained. They believe that the unauthorized access to the Global Payments systems only affected cards processed in North America and that the total number of compromised cards is less than 1.5 million. It is also believed that only Track 2 card data was compromised in the breach, meaning the card number and expiration dates would have been exposed, but not the cardholder’s name or address information.
Prior to the breach Global Payments was listed as one of many approved PCI compliant payment processors, but Visa revoked their compliance status following the unauthorized access and compromise of cardholder information effectively removing Global Payments from the list of approved processors. Global Payments is still able to process Visa transactions, however.
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