U.S. Archives - Latest News from Backup Technology

United Parcel Service (UPS) which is one of the largest shipment and logistics companies in the world has become one of the latest high profile companies to suffer a data breach.

UPS confirmed that they have suffered a data breach which has compromised data from around 105,000 customer transactions between January and August from 51 of its stores. Such stores that were affected are located in 24 U.S. states including New York, California and Texas.

UPS has confirmed that the data breach occurred due to malicious software being installed on their systems that has resulted on confidential data such as credit or debit card data, customer names and postal address being compromised.

Tim Davis who is the president of the UPS store stressed that as soon as they became aware of the data breach; the threat was contained and eliminated as quickly as possible.

Davis stated, “As soon as we became aware of the potential malware intrusion, we deployed extensive resources to quickly address and eliminate this issue. Our customers can be assured that we have identified and fully contained the incident.”

UPS have stated that they will not be notifying customers on an individual basis as they do not have all of the cardholder data. Therefore the emphasis has been places on UPS customers to check the UPS Store Inc.’s website to see if they have previously shopped at one of the affected UPS stores.

UPS has been keen to stress that so far, there has been no evidence of fraud because of the data breach.

UPS are the latest high profile company to have suffered a data breach which shows that it is now as important to ever to ensure security procedures and plans are in place and regularly tested and updated.

Supporting this, due to the increased threat from cyber thieves, it is now vital that all confidential data is also backed up with a robust backup solution to ensure that data can be recovered to the desired state if it is deleted or modified.

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 18^th 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.