Restaurant chain is announcing it too has been hacked. Not sure of details. If you have been there and used a credit card might want to check into it.
JFYI if true, this will also affect Pei Wei customers.
Never heard of Pei Wei… I don’t think we have those here. We do have a PFC though.
http://www.cnet.com/news/feedly-hit-with-ddos-attack-as-p-f-changs-investigates-possible-hack/
IT Security is getting to be big business. Unfortunately a lot of businesses don’t want to invest in IT. A friend of ours is a VP at a smaller financial institution and they outsourced their entire IT staff for Indians. She told me a staff member had her issued laptop go down and basically was non functional for 3 days until they could find someone to come in and fix it. I can only imagine how insecure their internal network will become. They basically handed the keys to the kingdom to some random 3rd worlders thousands of miles away.
Obviously nothing is 100% safe but investing in competent staff can greatly help mitigate this risk. Saving some money now may cost you a hell of a lot more later.
Pei Wei is an off shoot of P F Changs, think of it as their fast food version, but trust me its not fast food. Its actually pretty damn good.
Pei Wei is damn good but their portions suck hind tit. Better not go there hungry…
Mechanix Gloves was also hacked recently. Got a notice on Monday.
So are these hacks beg done at the time of the swipe or via some database where customer information is stored for an undetermined period of time?
As much as I hate to admit it there really isn’t much that can be made safe. Given enough time and temptation all things are susceptible to attack. And the billions of dollars that can be made on stolen cards and ID is a huge temptation.
Instead of wondering how to cost effectively band aid this convenience mess; I wonder if there is simply just a better more secure way to do business as a whole. While cash is pretty safe aside form getting lost or stolen, it’s hard to do business with amazon using cash. Is there some way to randomly generate a one time number good of a particular transaction at the point of sale. My CC company allows me to set up dummy numbers for specific amounts, but it needs to be dome up front. Not a big deal while shopping on line, but at Target not so much. Would it be technically feasible do this on the fly? No personal info to gleam and aside from the set value to the set vendor it’s not good for anything else.
Europe has been using RFID chips in cards for a long time. They don’t want to do that here because they’d have to replace most of the POS terminals in every store.
In the Target hack they got into the terminals themselves because they all feed back into data centers where the payment info is then processed. So the terminals were then sending the info as usual but also sending the card information back to the hackers. Target’s IT guys didn’t notice for weeks, the attack started around Black Friday. So the hackers knew a lot of people would be shopping and using cards.
Cards are not very secure in the US. There are card readers that are very small. I’m convinced a server at a bar did this to me once. Brand new card only used once and by the next day there were fraudulent chargers. I alerted the manager but at that point unless they had her on video you can’t prove it. What the Target hackers did is turn every POS terminal in every Target store into their own card readers. They get a ton more cards that way than one by one in a til restaurant. If you’re a server, and the manager starts getting complaints customers cards were compromised, they can see who handled those customers.
RFID imbedded card and such have their own set of headaches, but then I guess so does everything. We need burner cards like the cartels need burner phones.
From the consumer’s point of view, as long as you are using an actual credit card and not a debit card linked to your bank, what’s the big deal?
AMEX will immediately refund me the fradulent charges and I’ll be on my merry way.
Why do people make such a big deal out of things like this and what happened at Target? Even if you’re dumb enough to use your debit card (ever) at a retail establishment, if it’s got the VISA or M/C logo you’re still covered - it will just take longer for the money to be put back into your checking account.
Because some of us don’t like the idea of having other people noseing about in our business. Ever have your card hacked while you’re in BFE on vacation and need to buy gas?? Ever have your card hacked and turned off while you’re trying to do something important?? Ever get ripped off??Ever bounce a check cause someone drained your bank account? Why would anyone NOT be upset about stuff like that?? Ever have someone steal your identity and run up credit cards and generally make a mess of things costing you time and money to clean up??Why would you NOT be upset about that??
As a consumers or vendors we should be upset about people stealing crap that doesn’t belong to them.