Jason Brown of The Advocate has a story today about restauranteurs’ lawsuits against Radiant Systems and Computer World, a lawsuit covered previously on the blog. Of note, Brown cites a Secret Service agent involved in the case:
Luiz Velez, resident agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Baton Rouge office, said each hack involved restaurants using Internet-based computer systems.
Velez said more than 100,000 cards were exposed and conservatively placed the fraud loss for area banks at about $1.2 million.
Although 100,000 cards and $1.2 million might not sound huge when contrasted to mega-breaches like Heartland Payment Systems’ breach, this particular breach reportedly caused at least one restaurant to close its doors and another to give up taking credit cards. And of course, we only know about less than a dozen or so restaurants. Could there be other restaurants using this POS software that also had breaches that we haven’t learned about yet? It seems likely.
Charles Y. Hoff, general counsel for the Georgia Restaurant Association and one of the attorneys assisting in the Lafayette lawsuit, said he has received a multitude of calls from restaurant owners all over the country regarding similar claims.
“It is not isolated and it is something that is a real concern on a national level,” Hoff said.