If you visited any of the 211 P.F.
Chang or 192 Pei Wei Asian Diner restaurants across the United
States in the three month period of March, April and May of 2014 you
should get in contact with your bank, credit union or credit card
provider. Early on Wednesday Arizona-based P.F. Chang's China Bistro
announced that they were investigating the possible theft of customer
information including debit and credit cards. The security breach
could have left an untold amount of costumers vulnerable to identity
theft.
Anne Deanovic, a spokeswoman for the
Scottsdale, Ariz.-based restaurant chain, said Wednesday morning that
"P.F. Chang's takes these matters very seriously and is
currently investigating the situation, working with the authorities
to learn more. We will provide an update as soon as we have
additional information."
The discovery of the breach is credited
to Brian Krebs, the author of the KrebsonSecurity
blog, when he discovered
that thousand of credit and debit cards were being sold on an
underground website dealing in stole data. Mr. Krebs was also
credited with uncovering a breach where hackers stole credit and
debit card information from Target earlier this year. That breach
affect more than 40 holiday shoppers.
Mr.
Krebs explains that the most common way the hackers use to acquire
the information is to crack the security on the establishments cash
register and implant some malicious code that will download all of
the information off of the magnetic strips when the cards are run
through for payment. The data is then downloaded to the servers for
the hackers where they can then recode the data on a fresh magnetic
strip that they put on counterfeit cards.
Mr.
Krebs is a former reporter for the Washington Post
where in the 14 years (1995-2009) he worked there he did over 1,800
post on a security-based blog. While security wasn't Mr. Krebs, field
of study he became a self taught security expert after his home
network was hacked.
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