Heartland CEO On Why Retailers Keep Getting Breached
Robert Carr, chairman and CEO of Heartland Payment Systems, says lack of end-to-end encryption and tokenization were factors in recent data breaches.
Heartland Payment Systems chairman and CEO Robert Carr could be considered a rare breed of executive these days. He's been outspoken about the massive data breach the firm suffered on his watch in 2008 that exposed 130 million US debit and credit card accounts -- the largest breach ever recorded at the time. And in a new breach era when some corporate executives such as former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel have lost their jobs over high-profile breaches, Carr is still firmly at the helm of the payment processing firm.
Carr led Heartland's adoption of technologies like end-to-end encryption, tokenization, and EMV chip-and-pin payment card technology to shore up its security after the breach. "We took a position in 2009 that we're not going to clam up and try to point the fingers at somebody else," he told Dark Reading today. "That most definitely helped us a lot."
