Jacob Bunge and Tony Dreibus report:
Monsanto Co. confirmed Thursday that a security breach in one of the seed company’s servers left exposed some customer credit-card information and Monsanto employee data.
The breach occurred in late March, affecting about 1,300 farmers who are customers of Monsanto’s Precision Planting division, which makes specialized seed-planting equipment, according to a spokeswoman. One or more external parties hacked into the server, she said, adding that a company investigation suggests they weren’t seeking to take customer data.
Read more on WSJ.
Update, 6/2: Marshall Honorof reports that the 1,300 potentially compromised accounts included “names, addresses and — much worse — tax IDs, Social Security numbers and financial information.”