Heartland Payment Systems Inc. announced Tuesday that cyber criminals compromised its computer network to gain accessed on customers information.

It suffered a grievous security breach sometime in 2008, allowing hackers the opportunity to steal credit card information on what are possibly more than 100 million accounts each month.

Federal investigators determined the source of the breach only last week saying Identity thieves install spyware to monitor transactions somewhere on the company's internal network that sniffed unencrypted credit card transactions.

Heartland is the sixth largest payment processor in the country, and specializes in transaction processing for small-to-medium-sized restaurants and retailers.

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