Stephen Betts reports:
The Port Clyde General Store was one of hundreds of companies across the country that had data from its customers’ credit cards breached by hackers recently.
Attorney Stephen Hayes of Augusta, who represents the store, confirmed that the market was notified by police on May 21 that its system for processing credit card payments “had been compromised by a sophisticated group of criminal hackers.”
Read more on Bangor Daily News. The article also notes other breach reports recently received by the Maine Attorney General’s Office recently, including Vendini, Beachbody LLC, YourTel, the Edgemont Centre, Piedmont Healthcare P.A., Green Fun Store (operated by AHW LLC), and TD Bank.
The following statement was posted on the Port Clyde General’s Store web site:
On May 21, 2013, the Port Clyde General Store was notified by law enforcement authorities that its system for processing credit card payments had been compromised by a sophisticated group of criminal hackers. The data breach was discovered during an investigation of data security breaches that impacted dozens of Maine businesses and hundreds of companies across the United States. Port Clyde General Store immediately cooperated with the legal authorities and implemented the additional security measures recommended to protect our customers and their confidential information.
Port Clyde General Store uses an outside professional firm to install and manage the hardware and software for its credit card processing. The measures employed to protect customer data complied with all state and federal requirements, including encryption of customer data and daily erasure of customer information following transmission to the card processing company. The servers are protected by firewalls and are regularly scanned with updated antivirus and anti-malware software. The security breach was caused by malware that was designed to avoid industry- standard precautions. As the Maine Attorney General’s office explained to us, in this age it is not a question of “if” a business and its customers will be victims of a criminal computer attack but “when.”
Based upon our investigation and information provided by law enforcement, we believe that the data breach was of short duration and was not caused or aided by any action of our employees. We are highly confident that the measures taken will prevent a recurrence of any disclosure to unauthorized individuals. Nonetheless and despite our best efforts, it is likely that confidential information of some of our customers, including their credit card numbers, may have been captured by criminals for fraudulent purposes. We are sincerely apologetic for any loss or inconvenience this may have caused you. Many of our employees also encountered problems.
It is extremely important that our customers carefully scrutinize their credit card accounts for suspicious charges, a precaution that should be part of your normal practice. If you discover anything out of order, please immediately contact your credit card issuer and notify them. Under federal law, credit card customers are responsible for only the first $50 of fraudulent charges; many card issuers, including issuers of debit cards, have more generous policies. Please also report any fraudulent activity to Detective Don Murray of the Knox County Sheriff’s Department, 327 Park St., Rockland, Maine.
Sincerely, Linda L. Bean, Owner
Update 1: The Beachbody breach affected 607 residents of Maryland and 161 residents of New Hampshire who used the Powder Blue website. The breach was also reported to residents in Vermont and California, but we don’t have total numbers for this breach. Beachbody learned of the breach when some customer notified it of fraudulent charges on their cards after using them on their Powder Blue site.
Update 2: The AHW breach that affected Green Fun Store also affected GreenPartStore.com and FarmFunStore.com. AHW was alerted to the breach by Discover.