Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods Market suffered payment card breach

Pierluigi Paganini September 29, 2017

News of the day is that another big company suffered a security breach, the victim is the Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods Market has around 500 stores in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the company acquired by Amazon for $13.7 billion in late August, it now notified customers a  credit card security breach.

According to the security breach notification, crooks were able to gain unauthorized access to credit card information for customers who made purchases at certain venues like taprooms and full table-service restaurants located within some stores.

“Whole Foods Market recently received information regarding unauthorized access of payment card information used at certain venues such as taprooms and full table-service restaurants located within some stores.” read the data breach notification announcement. “These venues use a different point of sale system than the company’s primary store checkout systems, and payment cards used at the primary store checkout systems were not affected.”
At the time there the firm hasn’t provided details about the attack, it is still unclear which locations were affected and the total number of customers impacted.

whole foods market hack

The attackers targeted point-of-sale (POS) systems to siphon customer financial data.

The company pointed out that customers that used their payment cards only for groceries at Whole Foods were not affected, hackers targeted only certain venues which use a separate POS system.

Whole Foods Market clarified that hackers were not able to access Amazon transactions in the security breach.

The company is already investigating the incident and has hired a cybersecurity firm to help it, of course the firm promptly reported the incident to law enforcement.

“When Whole Foods Market learned of this, the company launched an investigation, obtained the help of a leading cybersecurity forensics firm, contacted law enforcement, and is taking appropriate measures to address the issue,” states Whole Foods.

The firm encourages its customers to monitor their credit card statements and bank accounts and report any unauthorized charges.

This is the last data breach suffered by major organizations, last week it Deloitte confirmed a security breach that exposed private emails and documents of some of its clients.

Recently credit rating agency Equifax publicly disclosed a major breach that affected 143 million Americans, meanwhile the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also admitted that hackers compromised its financial document filing system.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Whole Foods Market, security breach)

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