Fergie's Tech Blog

TJX Breach More Than Twice As Bad As Had Been Reported

Evan Schuman writes on StorefrontBacktalk:

Despite TJX having reported some 46 million consumers impacted, new documents now identify that number as about 96 million, including about 29 million MasterCard victims and 65 million Visa victims, according to documents filed with the federal court on Tuesday.

The new numbers came to light in filing from attorneys representing some of the banks now suing TJX.

"Beginning in July 2005, TJX experienced a massive intrusion into its computer systems, resulting in the largest data security breach in history and the compromise of an unprecedented amount of confidential nonpublic consumer personal data," said the plaintiff filing. "Although TJX suggests that the breach only affected approximately 45.7 million accounts, in fact the breach during a period of 17 months affected more than 94 million separate accounts. To date, Visa has calculated the fraud losses experienced by issuers as a result of the breach to be between $68 million and $83 million on Visa accounts alone."

Plaintiffs based their new numbers on depositions from Visa and MasterCard that had been confidential until Tuesday.

posted by Fergie @ 10/23/2007 10:00:00 PM