[HIB]One Man's Quest To Foil Hackers

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For Robert Carr, founder and chief executive of Heartland Payment Systems, the horror is still fresh. In December 2007 a group of wily hackers broke into Heartland's servers and accessed what the U.S. government estimates to be 130 million credit card numbers. Heartland makes card-swipe machines and software that store the 15-digit numbers that Visa and MasterCard use to verify transactions--a business, in other words, that depends on bulletproof computer networks. The announcement of the breach (on the morning of Barack Obama's inauguration) sent Heartland's stock on a two-month nosedive, to $3.60 from $18. Resulting settlements to credit card companies plus legal fees: $139 million (it recovered $31 million from its insurance carrier). "The worst thing that can happen to a processing company is to get breached," says Carr, 64. "It looked like there was a good possibility we wouldn't survive."

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