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Could 5-Year-Old Bank Rules Have Prevented The Heartland Breach?

Written by Evan Schuman
January 29th, 2009
A financial blog is raising a fascinating question, asking if banking security rules from 2004 might have prevented the Heartland data breach, where cyber thieves hid a sniffer program in an unallocated portion of a Heartland transaction server.

The financial blog quoted a well-placed security consultant, who apparently had direct knowledge of one of the Heartland probes, saying: "This was an 'I told you so' moment for me. I know exactly which part of the process got hit. It was the un-encrypted Point-to-Point connection, which occurs between the Host Security Module (HSM) and the Application Security Module (ASM). But that means that they had to have had a hole in their firewall to insert the sniffer into unallocated disk space."

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Posted in IT Strategy/Industry, Payment Systems, Premium Content, Security/Fraud
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