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Australians hit by US credit card breach 06:18 AEST Tue Jun 21 2005 At least 50,000 Australians have been caught out by a US credit card security breach. MasterCard and Visa have confirmed National Australia Bank (NAB) was among the first to report an unusual pattern of transactions, The Australian Financial Review reported. MasterCard said 50,000 of its Australian card holders were hit and Visa is yet to reveal how many of its Australian customers have had their details stolen. But an NAB spokesman said only a few hundred of its 1.5 million credit cards had been affected and they had been cancelled months ago. "This was an issue that our people discovered around Christmas," the spokesman said. "We replaced the affected cards and got on with our lives." MasterCard announced the security breach at the weekend and said it was traced to Atlanta-based CardSystems Solutions, which processes credit card and other payments for banks and merchants. The incident appears to be the largest yet involving financial data in a series of security breaches affecting valuable consumer data at major financial institutions and data brokers. About 13.9 million of the 40 million credit card accounts that may have been exposed to fraud were MasterCard accounts. It was not immediately clear how many of the other accounts were considered at high risk. The banks claim only cardholders who used their accounts in the US were affected, but MasterCard has said hackers could also have taken details from transactions made online. |
