45.7M Card Numbers Stolen in TJX Breach

Mar 29, 11:07 AM

Current Headlines: At least 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen from TJX Cos. computer systems, the Massachusetts discount retailer said.

It's the biggest card heist ever, Avivah Litan of technology consulting firm Gartner Inc. told The Boston Globe. It's done considerable damage.

The previous biggest reported breach was the 2005 theft of 40 million records from card processor CardSystems Solutions.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshall's and other stores in North America and Britain also said nearly a half-million other customers who returned merchandise without receipts in 2003 had personal data, including driver's license numbers, stolen.

TJX spokeswoman Sherry Lang told the Globe about 75 percent of the compromised cards were expired or had data stored as asterisks rather than numbers.

No data appear to have been stolen after Dec. 18, when the intrusion was first noticed, the Framingham, Mass., company said in its filing.

TJX faces an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and lawsuits from individuals and banks accusing it of failing to do enough to safeguard private data and of delaying disclosure of the problem.