Security Focus has reported that retail slugger TJX has finally settled up with all of the credit card issuers whose clients were exposed during the massive data breach they experienced in 2007. TJX has agreed to reimburse all of their clients for the cost of the reissue of their Mastercards. A few months ago TJX settled a $41 million claim with Visa in a similar response for their clients who had to have their Visa cards reissued with new credit card numbers.

The TJX breach was absolutely enormous with over 100 million credit cards exposed and their respective liability in covering was equally massive. It was unofficially advised for all clients to seek some sort of identity theft protection–Lifelock, Debix–something. Fortunately Lifelock is able to offer very significant identity theft protection for users at risk and the millions of people affected in this particular breach were prime Lifelock candidates.

It hasn’t been a great period for TJX–in addition to breach itself they were also sued by a collective of New England bankers (Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) covering over 300 different banks in an enormous class action lawsuit. Ultimately that was settled for an undisclosed sum but since the banks had to pay around $25 per credit card for cancellation and reissue you’d have to imagine that the settlement amount was an astronomical number since over 100 million cards were facing reissue.

TJX’s breach occurred between 2005 and 2007 and the original number of people affected was, as it was later revealed, “only” 46,000,000. Unlike a lot of news on identity theft, this case was a blatant crime–there was no misplaced laptop, misused password–this particular case was a run-of-the-mill network hijacking. To date, it’s still the largest data breach in US history, far surpassing the paltry 27 million people affected when CardSystems’ network was breached in 2003. Consider the size of the breach, the affected customers were very lucky to only have been on the line for $8 million dollars of merchandise purchased with the stolen credit cards. With 125,000,000 cards exposed, that’s only about six cents charged per card. That certainly doesn’t make it ok or fair or any positive at all but at the same time, six cents a card in the context of this breach isn’t really that bad. Protect your identity!