Hackers Breach Hannaford Supermarket Chain, Exposes 4.2 million Card Numbers

A major security breach at the Hannaford East Coast supermarket chain in the New England area exposed over 4 million card numbers that led to 1,800 cases of fraud. This shocking news was announced Monday by the Hannaford Bros. grocery chain which abundant on the east coast of the United States.

Credit card numbers were stolen during the network breach which resulted in several fraud cases where the card numbers were used or had attempted use. The breach affected all 165 Hannaford stores in the northeast US, 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida and a small number of independent stores that sell Hannaford products.

Card numbers are known as the only thing that was stolen. Customer's personal information such as names, phone numbers, and addresses were not obtained by the crooks. The breach is now known to have been happening since December 7th of last year and Hannaford didn't become aware of the attack until February 27th. The discovery on February 27th resulted from multiple customers reported fraudulent activity on their cards.

What has Hannaford done about this incident?

Hannaford president and CEO Ronald C. Hodge said Monday states, "We have taken aggressive steps to augment our network security capabilities. 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." The company has since asked customers to monitor their credit and debit card activity. The U.S. Secret Service is suppose to monitor and patrol fraudulent incidents such as this. They have confirmed that they are further investigating.

The source of the breach has not been disclosed as of yet. Card holders are urged to be mindful and monitor the activity on their card in the meantime until the investigation has run its course to identify the origin of the attack.

Hackers are turning up their rate of attacks lately. The security vendor Symantec noted that several other breaches have occurred in the past week including breaches of Harvard University, MTV Networks, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and others. No matter where we use our debit and credit cards, we must all be on the alert and monitor the activity of our accounts to prevent fraud and identity theft from hacker attacks that we cannot control.