ANX Corporate Blog

Welcome back to part 2 of my  blog series discussing the details of the recent Global Payments data breach. Last week I went over some general details surrounding the original breach disclosure and some of the early information that was available at the time.

On an April 2^nd conference call with Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia, incident details differ greatly from the original report disseminated by Brian Krebs. This conference call was closed to the press and was directed towards investors only as Q3 2012 results were also discussed.

You can listen to the full audio from the conference call here:

Global Payments Call

“The company believes that fewer than 1.5 million card numbers may have been stolen”, stated Paul.

They also believe that the “theft involved Track 2 card...

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You thought 2011 was the "Year of the Data Breach"?

Think again.

The Global Payments Inc data breach puts 2012 on the map in a BIG way.

So big, actually, that I had to break up this blog into a 2-part series to adequately cover all of the details.

In what has already become a solid runner-up for another “Year of the Data Breach” award, 2012 continues to deliver on the cyber crime front. Atlanta-based Global Payments Inc, one of the largest payment processors responsible for the transactions of more than 1 million merchant and business locations around the globe, has been breached. The official breach disclosure was self-reported on March 30^th by Global Payments and confirmed shortly thereafter by major card brands MasterCard and Visa. Many believe the disclosure was...

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Welcome to another beautiful Friday! Let’s start off today with a fun fact.

This Day in History: February 24, 1955

"A young boy is born to University of Wisconsin graduate students Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali. He is given up for adoption and taken in by a machinist and his wife in Mountain View, California. His name was Steve Jobs."

Data Breaches: The Expense That Keeps Rising

As many of you already know, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) just released their latest report: The 2012 Data Protection & Breach Readiness Guide. This report highlights some interesting statistics from companies that experienced data breaches in 2011; the year fittingly dubbed as “The Year of the Data Breach”. Let’s take a look at some of the more notable numbers included in the...

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“The ability to spread knowledge and inspire action are two of man’s greatest gifts” -Unknown

Welcome to the third installment of my data breach prevention/PCI compliance Tip of the Week blog series!

Recently, a very large software company has come under fire after discovering a data breach in one of its servers in India. The dissent this particular breach event has drawn is not rooted in how the attack was carried out, but in the lack of data security on those servers. The customer information that was taken in the data breach was stored in plain text. Sensitive customer information (including identifying and password information) was not encrypted. This company is not alone. The sad truth is that as more and more data breaches occur, the inadequate security measures of...

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Happy Friday everyone! It's been another week in the trenches talking to merchants and corporations about PCI compliance and data breach prevention. I'm doing a weekly blog summarizing some key observations. My objective with this blog is to bolster knowledge, dispel myths, and spread valuable information on various topics within the PCI compliance realm.

Data Breach Prevention/PCI compliance Tip of the Week: Change your default passwords!

A stifling amount of large data breaches involving sensitive information center around a common and highly preventable mistake; not changing default passwords! This is one of the top methods of attack that hackers use to penetrate a network.  In fact, password breach is consistently near the top of the list of data breach root causes....

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