“Visa also confirmed a “data compromise” of an outside company, but said there was no breach of Visa’s own network. Visa Inc. is aware of a potential data compromise incident at a third party entity affecting card account information from all major card brands. There has been no breach of Visa systems, including its core processing network VisaNet. Visa has provided payment card issuers with the affected account numbers so they can take steps to protect consumers through independent fraud monitoring and, if needed, reissuing cards”, Visa says in a statement to Mashable.com.

“Less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported, by hackers who had access to the firm's payment processing system. Cardholder names, addresses and social security numbers were not obtained by the criminals”, Global Payments said in a statement to Dailymailco.uk.

Mashable.com states, “neither Visa nor MasterCard issue their own credit cards. Instead, they process transactions made on cards issued by banks and other financial institutions”.