More than one thousand Wendy’s restaurants’ terminals were infected with malicious software that can steal credit card data and it is the data breach which is more than three times bigger than initially thought.
More Than 1000 Wendy’s Restaurants Were Hit By Hackers
Wendy’s customers were spotted suspicious operations with the bank cards in January of this year and it became known leak of customer data from the Popular American fast-food restaurant chain, Wendy’s.
Then it was assumed that the incident occurred due to the PoS-terminals affected 300 catering establishments, where the payment terminals were infected with malicious software that can steal the credit card data of its customers. However, as it turned out, the real figure reached 1025 (in total consists of about 3000 restaurants).
The chain of the fast food restaurants Wendy’s said on Thursday that “hackers managed to steal the credit card information and debit cards in 1,025 of its stores in the United States”, which is much more than initially believed.
On Thursday, the company said that “it would publish on its website a list of all the affected restaurants. But, by afternoon, the list was not been published by the company as they stated that due to “technical problems” they unable to publish the list of affected restaurants.
As the popular American fast-food restaurant chain, Wendy’s stated on its official blog that “In this continued investigation, Wendy’s has recently discovered a variant of the malware, similar in nature to the original, but different in its execution. This malware has been discovered on some franchise restaurants’ POS systems, and the number of franchise restaurants impacted by these cybersecurity attacks is now expected to be considerably higher than the 300 restaurants already implicated”.
Moreover, Wendy’s also added that “Upon detecting the new variant of malware in recent days, we have already disabled it in all franchise restaurants where it has been discovered, and we continue to work aggressively with experts and federal law enforcement to continue our investigation”.
Now it seems that the attackers have carried out more than one successful campaign, as in the course of further investigation, the experts found another version of the malware. According to Wendy’s representatives, for the successful attack, the attackers were successfully able to take the advantage of compromised credentials of the credit cards and debit cards. Hence, the company is now offering one year of “complimentary” fraud protection services to its affected customers.
