Nonprofit organisation, Goodwill Industries International Inc. has confirmed that they are currently investigating a possible data breach which may have left thousands of customer’s credit card information exposed.
The organisation has confirmed that they were contacted by a payment card industry fraud investigation unit and federal authorities on Friday 18th July who notified them that credit card numbers may have been stolen from some U.S. stores.
Goodwill have stated that they are currently working with credit card makers, the Secret Service and fraud investigators to see if they have suffered a data breach. Goodwill has stressed that they have yet to find any signs of a data breach occurring after several days of investigation.
Goodwill has more than 2,900 stores with annual retail sales exceeding $3.79 billion by selling donated merchandise to fund job programmes. If Goodwill has suffered a data breach, the overall impact may be reduced as they have no centralised database of all of its customer’s credit card information as the stores are operated by 165 regional headquarters.
Cybercriminals are developing more sophisticated ways of obtaining confidential data as the rewards become greater. It is there imperative that system security updates are regularly applied and strong passwords for accounts are used.
A robust backup solution should also be utilised to ensure that data can always be recovered no matter what action a hacker or cyber thieves takes such as modifying or deleting the data.
