Dive Brief:
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Costco Wholesale, Sam’s Club, CVSphoto.com, Rite Aid, and others have taken the precaution of suspending their web-based photo printing services over concerns about a possible data breach.
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The vendor PNI Digital Media, which manages and in some cases hosts the retailers’ photo services, says it may have suffered a breach.
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The retailers' e-commerce sites are not involved.
Dive Insight:
While it’s always a nightmare when customer data is hacked because of retail transactions, this one may be quite limited in scope. Many of the retailers didn’t actually process their customers’ credit cards through their photo sites, for example.
Still, it’s a problem, one that erodes consumer trust in retailers. There are a couple of lessons here: one, that retailers are dependent in some areas on their vendors’ vulnerability to a breach. And, two, that with the approach of EMV cards that will help stymie point-of-sales fraud, there’s still a lot of vulnerability to hacking on the Internet.
