I'm personally getting the feeling that downplaying it was more of a trip up on their part. They wake up, find they are suddenly being viewed as the devil, and for some strange reason want people to believe that things are not as bad as they look. The problem, though, is they should never have said that directly. They should have given us every reason to believe that things are not as bad as they look and have us come to that conclusion for ourselves. They should also get some PR people on pay; they probably need them more than the added security.

But technically speaking it really isn't a big deal, if you take any one of your own credit cards, extract the 'bin' and generate the rest of the numbers to be valid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm) you can make credit card numbers until you drop, with a high probability that they are currently in service (if your number is active, so are a lot of other numbers in your bin).

But those numbers alone will not allow you to do anything.