So, was there third payment processor breach or not? Visa’s evasive answers

Recently numerous media sources reported that a new data breach occurred to another, third payment processor after similar cases were announced by the Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay. The speculations on the new breach were provoked by the breach notices posted by some credit unions and banking associations. Now Visa says in a statement released Friday that in fact there was no new data breach revealed.

Visa announced that there was no security incident occurred after all and explained that the alerts it sent recently to banks and credit unions informed them about a compromise at a payment processor were related to the ongoing investigation of a previously known breach. Still the credit card network declines to unveil the name of the processor breached.

Visa explained its move to send lists of credit and debit card numbers found to have been compromised as part of the investigation to financial institutions "so they can take steps to protect consumers." Additionally the company also said that currently it "is risk-scoring all transactions in real-time, helping card issuers better distinguish fraudulent transactions from legitimate ones."

The latest statement of Visa follows the one made earlier by MasterCard International Inc. While the notices of credit unions clearly showed that they were speaking of another payment processor statements of Visa and MasterCard didn’t say that the breach being referred to was a new one, but they also didn't say that it was a previously disclosed incident. Visa’s remark was that the company is "aware that a processor has experienced a compromise of payment card account information from its systems," and MasterCard noted that it just notified card issuers of a "potential security breach" affecting a payment processor in the U.S.