30.6.16

Hard Rock Cafe experiences data breach



The Hard Rock Cafe and Casino Las Vegas has released a statement alerting customers that their data may have been compromised if they visited the resort between October 27th, 2015 and March 21st, 2016.
After receiving several reports of unauthorized activity associated with payment cards, the resort started an investigation into their card payment methods.
“On May 13, 2016, the investigation identified signs of unauthorized access to the resort’s payment card environment,” Hard Rock said in its statement.
“Further investigation revealed the presence of card scraping malware that was designed to target payment card data as the data was routed through the resort’s payment card system.”
In some instances, the program recognized payment card data that included cardholder names, card numbers, expiration dates and internal verification codes. In others, the program only found data that didn’t include the cardholder name.
The Hard Rock Cafe and Casino assured customers that they have alerted law enforcement officials and are working with the payment card networks to initiate heightened monitoring on cards that may be affected.
The resort recommends that any customers who suspect that they may have been victims of card fraud get in touch with their bank.
This incident is the latest in a number of attacks on high-profile organizations, although it must be noted that all organizations are targets.
Such is the concern that, at the start of the month, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a public service announcement warning people about online fraudsters looking to jump on the back of recent data breaches.
It stated: “Fraudsters quickly use the news release of a high-profile data breach to initiate an extortion campaign.
“The FBI suspects multiple individuals are involved in these extortion campaigns based on variations in the extortion emails.”