MAPCO Express, Inc. is the latest company to publicise that they have suffered a data breach that has compromised credit and debit card information of certain customers. It is believed that the hackers managed to infiltrate and access the payment card processing systems by using malware. Therefore alerts and warning are being made to any MAPCO customers who used their credit or debit card between 19^th– 25^th March, 14^th-15^th April and 20^th– 21^st April 2013. The affected stores include MAPCO Express, MAPCO Mart, East Coast, Discount Food Mart, Fast Food and Fuel, Delta Express, and Favorite Markets in Tennessee, northern and central Alabama, Arkansas, northern Georgia, Kentucky, northern Mississippi, and Virginia.

It is feared that this data breach could result in fraudulent credit and debit card transactions. Those who believe that their card details may have been compromised have been advised to contact their bank or credit/debit card Company and to stringently monitor their accounts.

MAPCO have confirmed that they managed to disable the malware once they became aware of the data breach and are stepping up their efforts to improve their security measures to help prevent such cases from happening again.

Tony Miller who is the vice president of operations for MAPCO stated, “Our first concern is our customers. We regret any inconvenience this criminal act by hackers may have caused and are enhancing our information security efforts to combat future information security threats. Through our internal investigation and collaboration with forensics security firms, we have disabled the malware that was used in this incident while establishing additional safeguards designed to prevent this from happening in the future.”

This is yet another case where the security measures implemented by a company who are dealing with sensitive data have proved not to be good enough and is another case where a company is being reactive as to proactive.

There is no doubt that hackers are becoming more sophisticated with their attacks and therefore the need to protect your data is becoming ever more crucial. By having a robust cloud backup solution in place, if you did suffer from a security breach where data is modified or deleted, you have the peace of mind that you will be able to recover your data, no matter what happens to it on your live production servers.

Are you worried about cyber-hackers? Do you have a robust cloud backup solution in place to protect your data?