Heartland CEO Calls for Industry Cooperation to Fight Criminals

"Our organization and business model founded on fair dealings, transparency and merchant advocacy have paid off these past few days," stated Robert O. Carr, Heartland's founder, chairman and chief executive officer. "This is demonstrated in the continued organic growth of our merchant base. Despite the headwinds of the economy and attacks by some of our competitors, we have installed new merchants, new payroll clients and new check management clients since our disclosure of the breach on Tuesday morning. Our record of candor, fair dealing, no arbitrary rate increases since our formation almost 12 years ago and superior customer service is highly valued.

"Merchants continue to respect Heartland for the manner in which we do business. They appreciate our ongoing efforts to help them manage the costs and complexities of payments processing," Carr continued. "Our energized organization called on the owners of more than 150,000 business locations these past three days to help them understand the breach and what it means to them. I couldn't be prouder of our entire organization for the way everyone has pulled together to help."

No confidential merchant data, Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), addresses or telephone numbers were retrieved in what is believed to be a global cyber-fraud operation. Heartland does not yet know how many card numbers were obtained. Many reports in the press are speculative.

Consumers will know if their card account numbers have been used by reviewing their monthly statements. Cardholders should report suspicious activity to their issuing banks (the bank that issued the card, not the card brand). If unauthorized use is confirmed, cardholders are reimbursed for the fraudulent purchases and are not held financially responsible.

Over the past few days, Carr has been talking to many industry leaders about working together to fight the cyber criminals who victimized Heartland and continue to jeopardize companies, consumers and data worldwide.

"I have talked to many payments leaders who are also concerned about the increasing success and frequency of cyber crime attacks," Carr noted. "Up to this point, there has been no information sharing, thus empowering cyber criminals to use the same or slightly modified techniques over and over again. I believe that had we known the details about previous intrusions, we might have found and prevented the problem we learned of last week."

Heartland's goal is to turn this event into something positive for the public, the financial institutions which issue credit/debit cards and payments processors.

Carr concluded, "Just as the Tylenol® crisis engendered a whole new packaging standard, our aspiration is to use this recent breach incident to help the payments industry find ways to protect its data - and therefore businesses and consumers - much more effectively."

For the past year, Carr has been a strong advocate for industry adoption of end-to-end encryption - which protects data at rest as well as data in motion - as an improved and safer standard of payments security. While he believes this technology does not wholly exist on any payments platform today, Heartland has been working to develop this solution and is more committed than ever to deploying it as quickly as possible.