In late October, Heartland Payment Systems, a Princeton, N.J.-based company that provides payment processing for roughly 200,000 U.S. businesses, was contacted by Visa and MasterCard about reports of fraudulent activity taking place on cards it had processed. A forensic examination revealed vicious malware on the company's server that was recording private cardholder data, and presumably transmitting it to a third party.
It was disturbing news for a company that processes roughly 100 million transactions per month, 40 percent of which are for small-to-medium-sized restaurants.
