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Grocery Chain Bagged By Online Criminals
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-03-18
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As many as 4.2 million credit card numbers were exposed during a security breach lasting several months at East Coast grocer Hannaford Bros.
 | | Grocery Chain Bagged By Online Criminals |  |
The breach ranks among some of the worst ever, with criminals perpetrating 1,800 incidents of fraud against credit card holders whose information they obtained from the grocer.
Hannaford president and CEO Ronald Hodge apologized for the epic security breach. "The stolen data was limited to credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates, and was illegally accessed from our computer systems during transmission of card authorization," he said.
Criminals did not obtain other personally identifiable information, like names or addresses, through their attack. Security vendor Symantec said in a statement that over 700 incidents during the past three years, including the massive Choicepoint and TJX breaches, involved nearly 219 million records of personally identifiable information.
Symantec noted Harvard University, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western New York, MTV Networks, and Oregon's Cascade Healthcare Community all suffered breaches in the past week.
A report at Yahoo News said Hannaford learned of the break in their security on February 27. They traced that breach to a December 7 incident.
Actual control of the problem did not happen fully until March 10. The company was slow to disclose the breach, as contracts with Visa and Master Card stipulate those credit card firms will not reveal the source of this kind of problem, the report said.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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