40 million credit cards affected by Mastercard Security Breach

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829378,00.asp

MasterCard International on Friday said a security breach of credit card payment data had exposed about 40 million cards of all brands to potential fraud in what one analyst said was the biggest privacy breach ever.

About 13.9 million of those credit cards at risk are MasterCard-branded cards, the company said. An unauthorized person infiltrated cardholder data at a company which processes transactions.

"It sounds like the Guinness Book of World Records here," said Richard Smith, a leading computer privacy activist who runs a Web site called ComputerBytesMan.com.