Over the weekend Mastercard announced that company data, including names account numbers and expiration dates for potentially 40 million of its card-holders (that's one-in-seven) had been compromised. The security breach arose via illegal access to the database of CardSystems Solutions Inc., a transaction processor for credit card companies.

Those numbers would have made this incident the largest such data security failure yet witnessed by an incredulous public as well as increasingly irritated state and federal regulators. The credit card giant has subsequently announced that it anticipates that only 200,000 customers face serious risk of fraud.

How comforting.

-- MDT

Labels: data breech, database