It seems that cyber attacks have reached to Heartland, too

On Tuesday, Heartland Payment System officially announced that their electronic payment database has been breached by a group of hackers. A representative at Heartland stated that the hackers took control of over 100 million operations, affecting more than 145,000 clients of the credit card company.

CFO at Heartland Payment, Robert Baldwin, stated that the company has not yet analyzed the total number of the customers who have been affected by the event. On the other hand, first estimates of the incident show that more than 600 million cardholders are susceptible to be affected by the scam but even so, most IT analysts stated that the number of the people who will actually be scammed will be far smaller. Still, Baldwin added that suspicious operations in the database have been tracked since the last few weeks of 2008.

In an USA Today interview, Baldwin pointed out that the company informed both the authorities and the credit card companies about the incident and that it collaborates with the Department of Justice and the United States secret Service in order to identify the people who did the fraud.

However, suspicions about the illicit affair had first came out from the credit card companies Visa and Master Card, both of which had sent notices to Heartland Payment before the company disclosed the incident.

It seems that the victims might be affected even further, as Baldwin pointed out in an interview that the hackers could have had access to other key information about the company’s clients, such as credit card numbers, along with their holders and expiration dates. However, the Heartland CFO stated that this unpleasant situation could only occur for unencrypted data on the servers.

After disclosing the data about the security breach, Baldwin apologized for the current state of affairs and stressed that the company is doing its best in order to restore all the data about their clients, along with minimizing any damage that the hackers have done. The CFO at Heartland also pointed out that the company will join forces with IT security companies in order to develop and implement software with improved protection and encryption capabilities.

If the estimated figures turn out to be true, the swindle at the Hartland Payment System might be the most severe and similar with 2007’s breach of the retail chain TJX in terms of financial damage.

Heartland Payment is a popular company across the US, as it offers its services for more than 250,000 business customers. The company offers payroll, check management, credit, debit and electronic payment services nationwide. Most of Heartland’s clients consists of bistros, restaurants, individual retailers and other small businesses.