Another stimulus to write secure applications (taken from the Washington Post):

A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.

If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.

It is not clear at the moment what exactly has caused the breach. The paper talks about some malicious piece of software, however, it says nothing about how had this code got to the payment processing network. In any case, a lack of attention or qualification (hope, the former) of developers and security officers has resulted in serious damage for the Heartland Payment Systems' reputation.

The data stolen includes the digital information encoded onto the magnetic stripe built into the backs of credit and debit cards. Armed with this data, thieves can fashion counterfeit credit cards by imprinting the same stolen information onto fabricated cards.