Theft of 45.6M Card Numbers Largest Heist Yet.

The article reports that TJX Cos. Inc. announced that its 45.6 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen by an unknown number of intruders from two of its systems for more than 18 months in the U.S. Such incident is considered the worst revealed compromise involving the loss of the company's personal card data. The personal data involving the return of merchandise without receipts by about 451,000 people in 2003 were also stolen. It is inferred that the number of stolen records has made such incident the biggest card robbery ever happened, which is believed to prove that there are highly sophisticated cybercriminals at large who have the potential to create such violence on pure-payment systems.