Law Enforcement Closing In On Heartland Breach Perpetrator:

The Secret Service has identified the prime suspect in the Heartland Payment Systems security breach, and the case has been turned over to the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a news report issued today.

Citing a source “close to the investigation,” the trade publication Storefront Backtalk is reporting that law enforcement is closing in on the Heartland data thieves. The publication’s source did not provide any additional information, but said the perpetrator’s location has been “pinpointed” outside North America.

Heartland, which on Tuesday disclosed a massive data breach that potentially affects more than 100 million credit card transactions, did not make a statement about the law enforcement efforts, but it did issue a new statement on the case earlier today.

The statement from Robert Carr, founder, chairman, and CEO of Heartland Payment Systems, suggests the payment processing company might have found the problem sooner if there had been more sharing of security information among the companies in the market.

“I have talked to many payments leaders who are also concerned about the increasing success and frequency of cybercrime attacks,” Carr said. “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.”

See the full report at Dark Reading.