This breech at Batteries.com shows that a merchant does not need to be large like Heartland to be targeted by hackers.

For more information regarding this breech, visit the Batteries.com security and fraud prevention page.

In an update shortly after Webhostingtalk came back online, Dennis Johnson, an iNET Community Coordinator sent out a detailed post explaining all that was then known about the breech with a firm statement that “Absolutely no credit card or PayPal data was exposed.”

Today Inet Interactive, the owners of Webhosting talk relased the news no one wanted to hear.

ANNOUNCEMENT – 1:25pm est 04/07/09

This morning, the hacker who attacked WHT initiated further communication. He provided evidence that credit card information on one of our database servers was, in fact, compromised during that attack.

While it is surprising that a hacker who has done that much damage would contact the victim, especially with this level of damage but there were apparent motives.  What is currently being done is even more shocking.  A post at Web Host Industry Review mentions the hacker may have been motivated after the hack to release the cardholder data to the web because they “had downloaded and looked through the database files, and raised some concerns about the manner in which the credit card information was being stored.’ and that the file allegedly includes stored CVV/CVC information.

Now, I don’t belive mentioning PCI compliance here will be necessary but it is quite obvious that based on the details so far, the data was not stored in a PCI compliant manner.