On January 20th, 2009 Heartland Payments, a credit card processing
company, issued a public statement indicating that a security breach had
occurred on their systems during 2008. This compromised credit card numbers and expiration dates only used in transactions processed by Heartland. MCN used Heartland to process credit card transactions during this time. We no longer process transactions through Heartland Payments.
As a precaution we are notifying all customers who used a credit card to pay a bill from January 1st, 2008 to January 13th, 2009 that they may be affected. Our records show that we processed a credit card payment for your MCN account between January 1, 2008 and January 13th, 2009.
MCN has contacted Heartland Payments but has been unable to obtain any information beyond that contained on the website (http://www.2008breach.com) that Heartland has set up to
provide information to the public. Information is still incomplete about this situation, but we can provide the following information.
1. We do not know whether any MCN customer's information was compromised.
2. No MCN system was compromised. No data transmission between MCN and Heartland was compromised. Only transmissions between Heartland Payments and banks were compromised.
3. As to the time frame of the security breach Heartland has stated only that it "was the victim of a security breach within its processing system in 2008".
4. Heartland will not be notifying individual merchants such as MCN about which credit cards were compromised. That information will go only to the banks involved. The banks will act as they see fit on behalf of their customers.
5. Heartland is stating on the 2008breach.com website that the problem is contained and no further data has been compromised.
MCN will continue to update this webpage at http://www.mcn.org/billing/heartland.html to provide updated information on this situation as it becomes available to us.
Please feel free to contact MCN Business Manager Mitch Sprague if you have any further questions regarding this manner.
