Aussies safe from US credit card breach
The breach at credit card processor Global Payments will not affect Australian transactions, according to the company, as it is confined to North America.
(Visa credit card image by Håkan Dahlström, CC2.0)
Over the weekend, Global Payments revealed that it had suffered a security breach, which, at the time, was thought to have exposed some 50,000 credit and debit cardholders' information. However, in a statement released by Global Payments, the company says it believes that the breach may have resulted in up to 1.5 million card numbers being exported from its processing system. According to the company, this system is confined to the North America region, and as a result, this would not affect any Australian transactions.
It has now engaged multiple information security and forensics firms to investigate the issue and its initial investigation has revealed that the information that was stolen is isolated to Track 2 card data.
This information stores the primary account number, expiration date of the card, as well as information such as whether a PIN is required to approve a transaction or whether the card can only be used in ATMs and not for goods and services. For this reason no cardholder names, addresses or social security numbers were obtained by the criminals, according to Global Payments.
Visa earlier stated that it has provided affected banks with the necessary information for banks to reissue cards, but given Global Payments' statement, few Australian cardholders should be among these.
NAB said that the impact in Australia would be minimal, but provided reassurances that it would protect its customers if they were affected.
"If [an] NAB account was compromised, the customer should contact us immediately and they would be covered under NAB Defence," the company told ZDNet Australia. "100 per cent of any fraudulent amount removed from their account would be reimbursed."
ZDNet Australia also contacted the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.