PRINCETON, N.J. — Heartland Payment Systems here, the payment processor that announced in January that it had been hit by a major data breach, successfully completed the first phase of an end-to-end encryption pilot project designed to enhance its security.
This first step involved the transmission of live AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-encrypted card transactions from an unnamed merchant to Heartland’s processing platform.
According to Robert O. Carr, Heartland’s chairman and chief executive officer, to his knowledge, this is the first time encrypted transactions have been sent from a merchant’s card reader to and through a major processor’s payments network.
“Yesterday’s transactions involved a Texas-based merchant and multiple credit card, prepaid and signature debit card transactions testing each of the major card brands,” Carr said. Cardholder data, he added, is typically unencrypted as it leaves a merchant’s terminal and is not encrypted until it is either tokenized in a gateway or at rest in the processing platform’s data warehouse.
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