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The Latest Chapter In Heartland’s Alice In Wonderland PCI Journey

Written by Evan Schuman
April 3rd, 2009
The back-and-forth compliance dance that is being forced upon Heartland Payment Systems took its latest journey through the PCI Looking Glass Friday (May 1), with Heartland declaring that it has now returned to Visa's list of PCI DSS validated service providers (aka the list of providers that Visa heartily recommends today but will deny ever having heard if they're breached tomorrow).


The journey began when Heartland was certified PCI compliant April 2008. A few months later, Heartland was severely breached and Visa began its revisionist history dance. Given a public stance that no PCI-compliant merchant or processor had ever been breached, Visa determined that Heartland therefore could not have been truly compliant in April 2008. On March 12, 2009, Visa removed Heartland from the compliant list. But just in case someone might mistake this move as Visa actually caring about security, Visa stressed to retailers that everything was OK and that they were completely safe using Heartland anyway.

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