Heartland sued in the court for inadequate security

A class action suit was filed by the law firm of Berger & Montague, P.C. last week on January 29, 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey against Heartland Payment System, Inc. The law agency will represent the interests of all cardholders in the U.S. whose credit or debit card data was stolen from Heartland Payment System, Inc.'s payment processing network.

In the course of the lawsuit the attorneys will be seeking to redress Heartland's failure to safeguard cardholder data, which was accessed and stolen by a computer hacker. Some source report that the number of card numbers that may have been affected accounts for 100 million. On some of those cards fraudulent activity was already registered.

The reports reveal that the malicious application was likely installed on Heartland's payment processing network as early as May 2008. Visa and MasterCard were alerting the payment processor of the unusual activity on cards since late fall 2008. Still, the company announced that in mid-January 2009 it located and contained malicious software on its network. Such a delay between when the intrusion was initiated and whet it was addressed proved incompetence and inadequate security measures featuring Heartland’s service.