40 million more--mastercard, databases, and personal info floating around the 'net

mastercard apparently let banks and account numbers slip into the open.

actually, it was a company called cardsystems solutions from what i've read. this might be their site, but i haven't been able to verify it.

anyway, they got infected by some kind of malicious script, which took the data, but both mastercard and cardsystems have been pretty quiet about it, unwilling to elaborate or take responsibility.

but this kind of major security breach (involving massive amounts of personal customer data) is becoming a common sight in the headlines, lately.

mastercard referred to cardsystems solutions as a victim, but i think that maybe they should be thought of less as one more victim (i mean there's forty million or so victims, in this case alone) and more of another criminal.

maybe what they did wasn't as bad or malicious as the person who stole all the numbers, but they should be held accountable for what they did(n't) do in the first place.

specifically, what i'm saying is that if this company makes money by handling parts of the credit card business that the credit card companies can't or won't deal with. that means there is a certain amount of trust involved between them and the credit card company, just like there is trust between the card company and its' customers.

part of their job is to provide a secure environment to utilize the huge data warehouses they have access to for legitimate purposes _WITHOUT_ exposing that information to hostiles in the outside world.

they have FAILED in this capacity of their job. and it's not a small job. not, like they forgot to make the pizza sauce, or didn't order enough of a certain size of tire.

it's not like the lead singer got sick and they had to cancel a tour--these guys were careless and/or incompetent with information that could cause a whole lot of grief to a whole lot of people.

i just hope that pretty soon, america will hear this wakeup call and act. corporate america certainly reacts when their money is threatened. well, our money (and our rights) is being threatened by them, so now private america needs to react. we need to come together to protect ourselves before this snowballs out of our control.

--cid