40 million credit card numbers (with associated CVV's apparently) hit the streets via CardSystems; I recommend Adam's take on the incident for anyone who hasn't heard. In my opinion, it is the volume of this exposure that makes it significant and not anything intrinsic to the data itself.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm starting to become thick-skinned and cynical about the repetitive mantra of disclosures coming from Wall Street, Delaware, etc. And to put the icing on the cake, consider the multiple recent Equifax disclosures - two batches in the past month. Think about what a criminal could do with a bunch of credit histories.
Why do we as consumers continue to just sit there and take it? Where are the lawyers? I bet a good class action law suit from the 40 million folks who lost their information because of CardSystem's negligence would wake somebody up. This is all data that CardSystems was not supposed to have stored in the first place - in fact, it directly violates the security rules of both Visa and MasterCard. I hope there are lawyers out there mulling over right now how to put CardSystems over the fire for this one.
Posted by Ed at June 20, 2005 09:36 AM