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In-Depth Information
Heartland Payment Systems
Heartland Payment Systems was founded in 1997 in Princeton, New Jersey, by
Robert O. Carr. Its main business is processing credit card payments.
Credit cards were based on IBM's magnetic stripe that could be pasted onto
plastic cards. Soon after the stripe's invention in 1960, Visa, MasterCard, Americ-
an Express, and others would make credit card purchases universal.
Heartland is one of several companies whose main business is actually process-
ing the card payments from thousands of merchants and small retail organizations.
These companies are more or less invisible to consumers but provide the “engines”
that make credit cards useful. They all use software and powerful computers be-
cause they process millions of transactions per day. Heartland currently processes
credit card data for around 250,000 businesses that generate about $120 billion per
year in credit card payments.
In 2009, Heartland made front-page news due to a massive cyberattack that
stole credit card data from the magnetic stripes of thousands of individual con-
sumers' credit cards. The actual theft occurred in 2008. A man named Albert
Gonzalez was arrested and indicted and later convicted and sentenced to 20 years
in federal prison.
The attack was seemingly based on SQL injections, which introduced back-
door traps that diverted user data to false addresses so information could be ex-
tracted. Once the data are stolen, they can be magnetically encoded onto phony
cards. Similar attacks and other indictments were issued for attacks against the re-
tail store T. J. Maxx and the Dave and Buster's restaurant chain.
The Heartland cyberattack is a cautionary tale that in the modern world, data
stored on computers are more valuable, and sometimes easier to steal, than gold.
In the aftermath of the attack, Heartland introduced new and improved security
methods that include full encryption of all data.
Insight Venture Partners
As can be seen by the number of multibillion-dollar software companies cited in
this topic, the software industry has generated enormous wealth. This wealth is of-
ten created when startup companies become successful. Insight Venture Partners
specializes in funding software startups.
The company was founded in 1995 in New York by Jeff Horing and Jerry Mur-
dock. In total, Insight has invested in about 170 software companies, including
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