Heartland boss calls for industry collaboration

The head of Heartland Payment Systems has called for industry collaboration to combat cybercrime attacks.

Following an attack by cybercriminals where a potential 100 million credit card transaction details may have been intercepted, Robert Carr, Heartland's founder, chairman and chief executive officer has called for information sharing to better defend itself.

After cybercriminals planted spy software on Heartland systems, Carr held meetings with others in the payments industry and called for greater information sharing to prevent cybercriminals from using the same or similar techniques in multiple attacks.

Carr said: “I have talked to many payments leaders who are also concerned about the increasing success and frequency of cybercrime attacks. Up to this point, there has been no information sharing, thus empowering cybercriminals 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.

“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.”

Despite the negative press caused by the incident, Heartland claimed to have added more than 400 merchants to its client base in the past few days - exceeding results for the same period from last year.

The company is also working towards the 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.

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