The Target data breach, which compromised the data of 40 million cardholders continues to have ramifications across the industry. Following a class-action lawsuit against Target for the data breach, MasterCard and Visa are now targets of a separate class-action lawsuit related to the breach.
Visa and MasterCard face a Target-related lawsuit
In an order dated August 13, the US Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation detailed claims that the networks’ delay in implementing EMV in the US was a factor in the breach occurring. The lawsuit also asks why the networks “declined to implement that technology in the US, and whether the technology would have prevented harm to plaintiffs and class members – not just from the Target data breach, but from any number of data breaches in the last two decades,” the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation stated.
However, even if EMV had been adopted earlier in the US, this would not have prevented the data breach from occurring, given that it was the result of malware-infected POS systems. EMV does not prevent card-not-present fraud, which is a growing problem for online merchants. Instead, payment networks and other stakeholders are now focusing on tokenisation, which encrypts payment data at the POS.
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