Payment Processor Hit With Massive Breach

A recent data breach suffered by Global Payments Inc., a processor of debit and credit card transactions, may have put millions of consumers at risk for being hit by fraud.

The incident, in which hackers gained access to as many as 1.5 million credit and debit card account details from all of the major card brands - Visa, MasterCard, etc. - occurred a few weeks ago and could have far-reaching effects, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. At this time, the company does not know of any fraudulent transactions on the accounts that were affected.

The company alerted Visa and MasterCard to the incident late last week, but discovered the problem roughly three weeks ago on "a handful of servers," the report said. However, the larger companies' systems were not compromised.

Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the threats hackers pose and what consumers and companies can do when they are affected by this type of attack.