Global Payments, which provides processing services for nearly every major credit card company including Visa and MasterCard, admitted it had suffered a major security breach on Friday.
The breach was revealed after Visa withdrew from using the company’s services as a result of the problem.
According to The Wall Street Journal, card and account information was exported from the servers of Global Payments.
It’s thought that the criminals didn’t obtain card-holder names, addresses or social security numbers. However the company admitted that the data taken from each account would be enough to make fraudulent transactions or clone the cards.
A spokesperson from Global Payments told the Wall Street Journal: “[b]ased on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional security measures, the company believes that this incident is contained.”
Visa has released a statement saying their customers were victims of data theft, but added that its own systems had not been hacked. Mastercard also issued a statement saying it was monitoring the situation.
Global Payments has not revealed how the intruders got access to the information.
