Data Breach + Media = Disaster

There was a large data breach announced today by Visa and Mastercard. I think more than ever, this breach shows how dangerous the media is at blowing a story our of proportion before anyone actually know what the details are.

What is known…

Most likely a parking garage, or network of parking garages, suffered a data breach, most likely in the state of New York. Global Payments was most likely the processor for this business. That’s about it!

Here’s what the media shows:

Point being, that some publications like to blow the proportions of a story out of the water before there’s any fact to the story. Time will tell what has actually happened and it may be a very bad situation. But, the difference between 50,000 cards as reported in the Wall Street Journal, and 10,000,000 cards as reported in MSN’s red sheet, is incomparable.

And consumers and the government wonder why businesses don’t always come right out and tell everyone.