MasterCard International said on Saturday that the account information of more than 68,000 cardholders was especially at risk in a security breach that potentially involved data on millions of customers.
Joshua Peirez, a MasterCard senior vice president, said the company had found evidence that a file with MasterCard cardholder data had been removed from a computer network in Tucson belonging to CardSystem Solutions, which processes credit-card transactions.
MasterCard said on Friday that in perhaps the largest financial data breach disclosed so far, intruders potentially had access to the cardholder names, account numbers and security codes of about 40 million customers. That included 22 million Visa holders and 14 million MasterCard holders. There were also about 6 million accounts from other credit-card companies, like Discover Financial and American Express.
"Our forensic people, when they went in, and were able to find a file that had the 68,000 account numbers, and they were able to conclude it had been exported from the system," Peirez said. "Those are the accounts that our banks will be very much focused on."
Peirez said the decision to disclose the data breach was made after law-enforcement officials finished examining the file on Thursday night.
On Friday, with the authorities' approval, MasterCard began notifying its member banks of the security breach and sending specific lists of the 14 million exposed accounts over a secure data network. It is up to the banks that issued the cards to determine the next step.
"We tell the banks what we know. It's their customers and their liability," Peirez said. "In some instances, they will contact customers right away. In some instances, they will monitor accounts. In some cases, those issuers may have caught something already."
Paul Cohen, a spokesman for Visa, said it had also alerted its member banks after it was informed of the breach on Thursday night. American Express and Discover have said that they learned of the stolen data recently and were closely monitoring those accounts. "On those 22 million accounts, we are not seeing any unusual fraud patterns at these early stages," Cohen said.
In a statement on Saturday, Visa said that it was aware of the situation, but had not disclosed the data breach because of a request by law-enforcement officials that it be kept confidential for fear of compromising an investigation.
Deborah McCarley, an FBI special agent in Phoenix, said the public disclosure did not hurt the investigation, though the agency had asked CardSystems not to discuss the case.
"If MasterCard believes it is necessary to inform cardholders, it needs to do what it needs to do," she said. "There are different ways to investigate a case."
Still, the disclosure left many financial institutions scrambling to sort through the data.
"We are not notifying anybody yet, because we just found out yesterday," said David Chamberlin, a Chase Cards spokesman. "We are poring through data as fast as we possibly can."
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