Essay on Case Study

Submitted By Luvpreet08
Words: 1173
Pages: 5

Global Payment Inc. Security Breach Case Study

Lovepreet Dhaliwal

DeVry University

Accounting Information System

Professor Douglas Letsch

Douglas

The case study I choose to look at was the one that happened to be just recently that occurred March of last year 2012, where a company by the name of Global Payments Inc., whom is a processor company for credit and debit card for Visa and MasterCard’s, and according to the wall street journal it was hit by a security breach. In the article it acknowledges that Brian Krebs, who runs a security site www.kerbsonsecurity.com, reported that his sources in the financial said the breach might involve more than 10 million compromised card numbers. Master card said in a statement they have alerted payment card issuers regarding certain MasterCard accounts that were potentially at risk, and they have also hired an independent data security organization, which is conducting a forensic review of the situation. MasterCard had also implied that it wasn’t there own system that been damaged by the security breach but it was the third party, which is Global Payment system that had been hit by it. One of Visa’s spokeswoman stated in an email “that there is no issue or impact to Visa’s systems or our processing network VisaNet. This is an issue with a third-party”. As MasterCard and Visa sent alerts to banks, Krebs reported, the card processor was compromised between Jan. 21-Feb 15, and banks are reviewing transaction in data trying to determine a common point of purchase. This is why having transaction data is very important as it helps out with tracking back to a person’s purchases and trying to determine if the information from the card was stolen and is being used somewhere else. It was also determine that full Track 1 and Track 2 data was taken, which means that the information could have used to counterfeit new cards according to Krebs.

As the story processed In April of 2012 Visa had dropped the card processor Global Payment Inc. Global Payments is what you would call a “payment processor”, which connects the merchant to the credit card company. They have links to Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express. In simple words Global Payment is the middle man and it makes sure you’ve got enough money, or credit, to buy something from the store when someone uses their credit card. All the information is going back and forth from the store where the item is being purchased from to the credit card company, to the bank, in a matter of spilt seconds. Global Payment said it believes less than 1.5 million credit card numbers were stolen in the cyber security breach. They also said it was so-called Track 2 card data was stolen but card holders’ names; addresses and social security number were not obtained. They also said the security breach location happened to be in North America. More information on Track 2 is a person improperly using Track 2 information can transfer the account number and expiration data of a card to a magnetic stripe on a fraudulent card and then try to use it to make online purchases. The way this could be blocked is when online merchants ask for the CVV code, or the three or four digits usually located on the back of the card. Global payments are targeted by hackers due to the vast amount of sensitive financial information they handle in their data base. Hackers want to get this information, because simple its where all the money is and it’s a big hit for them as someone is who is trying to rob a bank. Statically there are 800 million cards in the U.S. and there are only 300 million people, so you the motive for the hackers are who do this on regular bases.

Credit cards being in hands of everyone in the U.S. today this was a case of identity theft and fraud, and how hackers want to use the personal information of people and accomplish this. Motive