Global Payments Reveals More Details About Security Breach, Loses Visa's Seal-of-Approval

Global Payments Inc. issued a press release over the weekend revealing more details about the massive security breach that they recently suffered.

According to Global Payments, in early March 2012, around 1.5 million credit card numbers were stolen from servers in their North American processing system.

Global Payments stated that only Track 2 card data was stolen and that cardholder names, addresses and social security numbers were not accessed during the breach. CEO Paul Garcia also shot down news report claims that fraudulent activity had been reported on the stolen card information in a conference call held with investors Monday morning.

What’s strange about this incident is the amount of conflicting details that have been featured in the news ever since KrebsonSecurity.com first broke the story on Friday.

In the alert notices issued by Visa and MasterCard, the amount of affected credit card numbers was around 50,000 and the breach window was from January 21st to February 25th, 2012. Furthermore, the alerts warned that the attackers could use the stolen information to create counterfeit cards since full Track 1 and Track 2 data had been taken.

It was also mentioned in the original KrebsonSecurity.com post that "unnamed sources" had stated over 10 million card details were lifted.

Obviously, none of those details match those of the Global Payments hack, which has opened up the discussion over whether or not the Global Payments breach was simply one of many.

Regardless of whether or not Global Payments was the only processor hit, Visa has removed Global Payments from their extensive list of compliant service providers [PDF] due to the “unauthorized access to a portion of its processing system.”

Still, this does not prevent Global Payments from processing payments – and they even claim they’re still signing up merchants!

For those who are curious enough to follow Global Payment's press releases on the whole ordeal, they've actually setup a website for you to do just that - 2012infosecurityupdate.com.

Feel free to leave your take on the breach in our comment section below.

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