Second Largest Security Breach Recently Exposed
A supermarket chain based on USA’s East Coast has recently discovered and contained a security breach that exposed over 4 million credit and debit card numbers and let to 1,800 fraud cases.
According to a Hannaford Bros. grocery chain statement cited by Yahoo News, the card numbers were stolen during the card authorization process and about 4.2 million unique card numbers were exposed. Given the scale of the exposed data, this is one of the largest data breaches ever reported, although it is still far from the top leader, the TJX incident.
Hannaford became aware of the breach Feb. 27. Investigators later discovered that the data breach began on Dec. 7; it wasn’t contained until March 10, said Carol Eleazer, Hannaford’s vice president of marketing in Scarborough.
“We have taken aggressive steps to augment our network security capabilities,” Hannaford president and CEO Ronald C. Hodge said in a statement released Monday. “Hannaford doesn’t collect, know or keep any personally identifiable customer information from transactions.”
The breach affected all about 300 chain stores and independent groceries that sell Hannaford products. No other information such as names or addresses have been exposed, but the account numbers were enough to commit frauds for over 3 months. The names or aims of those responsible have not been disclosed, both state security agencies and MasterCard/Visa representatives giving limited comments on the issue.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:12 pm
[...] it made security magazines’ headlines, the Hannaford data breach that exposed 4.2 million credit card accounts still ranks high in the news. The question on [...]
April 30th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
[...] the second largest security breach in the history reported at Hannaford, another data exposure involving credit cards has just been covered by the [...]