Via Boston Globe -
More than 94 million accounts were affected in the theft of personal data from TJX Cos., a banking group alleged in court filings, more than twice as many accounts as the Framingham retailer has said were affected in what was already the largest data breach in history.
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The data breach affected about 65 million Visa account numbers and about 29 million MasterCard numbers, according to the court filing, which was made late yesterday by a group of banks suing TJX over the costs associated with the breach. The banks cited sealed testimony taken from officials at the two largest credit card networks. A Visa official also put fraud losses to banks and other institutions that issued the cards at between $68 million and $83 million on Visa accounts alone, the filing states, the most specific estimate of losses to date.
TJX, which operates more than 2,500 stores worldwide under such brand names as TJ Maxx and Marshalls, previously has said the unidentified hackers who breached its systems had com promised at least 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers as far back as 2003. TJX has said about 75 percent of the compromised cards were expired or had data in the magnetic strip masked, meaning the information was stored as asterisks rather than numbers.
A TJX spokeswoman said she couldn't immediately discuss the filing yesterday, and said the company doesn't generally discuss pending litigation. Spokesmen for Visa and MasterCard did not respond to questions last night.
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That is scary close to 1 in 3 Americans.
The United States population was put at 303 million and change in Oct 2007.
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