You have been hacked. Maybe.

I missed this announcement in the flurry of coverage of the inauguration. Here's another company you never heard of that may end up causing you some grief.

Heartland Payment Systems is one of the companies that processes authorizations for credit/debit card transactions. It's one of those out-of-mind companies that you interact with every day and don't think about until something dire happens. It seems that their computer system was compromised some time last year and credit card information was flowing somewhere. They don't know where; they don't know how much; they don't know the time period involved. In fact, it took from October until this week for computer forensics experts to confirm that there was a problem. The issue was noticed by the credit card companies based on elevated levels of fraud related to transactions processed by Heartland but whoever hacked them covered their tracks very well. (The other explanation is that the effort to uncover the problem was half hearted, but I'd like to think that the company would bring in the best talent available to address an issue that will likely result in their demise as a viable corporation.)

This is not the first incident of this type, but it may be the largest. Heartland services 250,000 businesses and the number of individuals affected could easily be in the tens of millions. That might include you. Given the difficulty they've had in isolating this problem, it's going to be hard to narrow down who was actually affected or could potentially be affected in the future. Re-issuing tens of millions of credit cards is a daunting task.

Moral of the story: Keep an eye on your credit card statements. This type of fraud often results in a charge that's so small the the customer figures it's more trouble to question it than to just pay it. "I don't remember buying this, but I must have since it's on the bill." Multiply that small amount by several thousand and someone just got rich.

Credit cards are a big convenience, but it's things like this that offset that convenience. I hope that the industry gets its act together because if they provide their customers with this kind of hassle we'll decide that the inconvenience of using cash is preferable to the potential problems of using credit cards.