About 1 per cent of UPS stores across the United States have been hit by a credit card information stealing malware yesterday. The shipping and business services store, extensively accessed by users for online purchase, announced that 51 stores or 1 percent of its total number of stores have been hit by this intrusion in close to 24 states in the US.
Credit card information of all users who used their credit or debit card at the 51 stores between January 20, 2014 and August 11, 2014 may have been compromised due to this breach. All general and critical information such as Name, postal address, phone numbers, bank account details and credit card information could have been leaked.
The UPS store president apologized for this breach and inconvenience caused to customers and said in a statement, that as soon as they were aware of the potential malware intrusion, they deployed extensive resources to quickly address and eliminate this issue. Customers can be assured that they have identified and fully contained the incident.
The US government had notified the UPS store about this ‘broad-based malware intrusion’ and upon investigation by a security firm, it was discovered that at least 51 systems at various UPS stores were infected.
UPS has over 4,470 franchised stores across the United States and has said to have recorded more than 105,000 transactions within the period of January 2014 – August 2014. However, the exact number of customers whose information may have been leaked still remains unknown.
Over the past few months, several retail giants in the US such as Michaels Stores, department store Neiman Marcus and restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s revealed that they were victims of security breaches aimed at stealing customer’s credit card information. With these frequent security breaches, all these stores have come up with strict security measures in order to protect customer information.
