After Delta Air Lines and Sears Holdings, Best Buy has also come forward to warn customers that their payment card information may have been compromised as a result of a breach suffered by online services provider [24]7.ai.
Similar to Delta and Sears, Best Buy contracted [24]7.ai for online chat/support services. The retailer says it will contact impacted customers and provide free credit monitoring if needed.
Best Buy has not specified exactly how many of its customers are impacted, but noted that “only a small fraction of our overall online customer population could have been caught up in this [24]7.ai incident, whether or not they used the chat function.”
San Jose, CA-based [24]7.ai provides customer acquisition and engagement solutions to organizations in a wide range of sectors and any of them could be impacted by this incident. Its website lists several major firms, but some of them apparently no longer do business with the company.
Delta has set up a dedicated page on its website and it has provided some new information regarding the incident. According to the airline, cybercriminals planted a piece of malware in [24]7.ai software, which captured some payment card data between September 26 and October 12, 2017.
“[The malware] made unauthorized access possible for the following fields of information when manually completing a payment card purchase on any page of the delta.com desktop platform during the same timeframe: name, address, payment card number, CVV number, and expiration date,” Delta explained.
The airline believes the incident may impact hundreds of thousands of customers, but it cannot say definitively whether any information has actually been stolen by the attackers.
It appears that the malware involved in this attack is capable of harvesting payment card information entered on websites that use the [24]7.ai chat software. Consumers may be impacted even if they have not directly used the chat functionality, which has only been leveraged as a point of entry to the websites of major organizations. These types of attacks have been common in the past years.
Sears Holdings, the company that owns the Sears and Kmart retail store brands, says the incident has impacted the credit card information of less than 100,000 customers.
Sears and Delta said they were only notified by [24]7.ai in mid and late March, several months after the breach had been supposedly contained.
Contacted by SecurityWeek, [24]7.ai said it could not provide any additional information about the breach, citing client confidentiality agreements.
Related: Orbitz Data Breach Impacts 880,000 Payment Cards
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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