Global Payments, the payment processor hit earlier this year by a massive data breach, said on Thursday steps to fix the security lapse have cost the company, so far, nearly $85 million.
The Sandy Springs-based credit and debit card processor said its investigation into the “data intrusion” is complete. Global Chairman and CEO Paul Garcia said the company is working to become compliant again with card processing industry standards required by major players such as Visa and MasterCard. That should happen by the end of the year, he said.
Visa and MasterCard dropped Global from its compliance list after the company acknowledged in late March that its systems had been breached and about 1.5 million account numbers from several major providers had been compromised. The Social Security numbers, names and addresses of the cardholders, however, had not been obtained by thieves.
The Wall Street Journal reported in May as many as 7 million accounts might be vulnerable, because hackers might have had access to Global’s systems for longer than initally thought.
Global continues to process Visa and MasterCard payments, and though losing compliance can scare off merchants, Garcia said the company added new merchants despite the breach.
“The data intrusion incident will soon be behind us,” Garcia told analysts Thursday.
Global processes billions of transactions each year at more than 1 million places worldwide, according to the company’s website.
Last month, Global also warned that hackers also might have accessed the personal information of an unknown number of merchants who’d applied with Global for payment processing services.
Adam Levin, an identity theft expert and chairman of Credit.com, said the Global breach is another wakeup call that governments and companies may not be doing enough and that consumers must protect themselves.
“Companies have got to be more proactive,” he said. “Even the ones that are really good [at security] are finding that the bad guys still find a way to beat them.”
Global said net income for the fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31 was $5.1 million, down 91 percent from the quarter a year ago, largely from the $84.4 million cost attributed to the breach. Profit on a per share basis was 6 cents compared to 72 cents in the same fiscal quarter a year ago.
Quarterly revenue increased 15 percent.
Also Thursday, Global announced plans to pay $242 million to acquire the stake in its Asian payments joint venture held by HSBC.
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