Visa Suspends Global Payments

The New York Times reports today that Visa has suspended Global Payments after Friday's reports of a significant data breach. You can find reports of the breach all over the Web (here, here, and here).

If you use Global Payments for your card processing, here are a few things to keep in mind. First, the Visa suspension is temporary, and not permanent (at least, so far). Also, MasterCard has not acted similarly (again, at least so far). Get in touch with your representative and find out what are their plans.

Because Visa has removed Global Payments from their list of service providers does not make your institution non-compliant with PCI. It does, however, reinforce the importance of your having the protections of Requirement 12.8 (especially 12.8.2) in place.

Meanwhile, monitor the Web for further developments. This story broke on Friday, and it has grown over the weekend. It is quite likely more developments will be coming.