Expert Witness Blog
In August 2009 the Justice Department accused three men of stealing account information for more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers. Networking expert witness Ivan Zatkovich, principal consultant for the security firm E-Comp Consultants, had this to say on the credit card fraud case.
In this particular case, they hacked in to a payment gateway system, which is actually a central hub for processing millions of credit card transactions specifically for outlets like 7-Eleven and supermarket outlets like Hannaford Brothers supermarkets.
I think it’s a matter of diligence in terms of data security for the companies that run payment gateway systems. In fact, Heartland Payment Systems was cited in 2007 for being out of compliance with data security and were just reinstated last year by Visa after meeting compliance and as recently as this year they’ve been touting themselves as a leader in data security. Which turns out not the be case.