Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Dickey’s Barbecue Pit Investigating Possible Breach Affecting 3M Payment Cards

A data set of millions of payment card records apparently stolen from US-based restaurant franchise Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has emerged on a Dark Web marketplace, Gemini Advisory reports.

A data set of millions of payment card records apparently stolen from US-based restaurant franchise Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has emerged on a Dark Web marketplace, Gemini Advisory reports.

The data, posted on the Joker’s Stash underground marketplace, appears to have been harvested from over a hundred compromised locations. The data seems to come from 35 US states and several countries in Europe and Asia.

The data set, which is titled BLAZINGSUN, supposedly contains 3 million payment records, with an average price of $17 per card.

There are 469 locations across 42 states that are operating under the Dickey’s Barbecue Pit franchise, each of them allowed to use the type of point-of-sale (POS) device they like, as well as their preferred processors.

According to Gemini Advisory, the data that emerged on Joker’s Stash suggests that 156 Dickey’s locations across 30 states may have been compromised. The data was supposedly harvested between July 2019 and August 2020.

“Dickey’s operates on a franchise model, which often allows each location to dictate the type of point-of-sale (POS) device and processors that they utilize. However, given the widespread nature of the breach, the exposure may be linked to a breach of the single central processor, which was leveraged by over a quarter of all Dickey’s locations,” Gemini Advisory says.

The security firm also notes that the exposure by location does not exactly align with the restaurant’s distribution across states, although with the exception of Texas, which hosts 123 restaurant locations but only three compromised locations, the exposure is approximately reflective of the overall distribution.

Gemini also says that the payment transactions in this breach were processed via the magstripe method, which is outdated and prone to attacks. However, it’s unclear whether the affected restaurants employed outdated or misconfigured terminals.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

“Based on previous Joker’s Stash major breaches, the records from Dickey’s will likely continue to be added to this marketplace over several months,” the security firm notes.

The restaurant chain says it’s aware of a possible data breach and it has launched an investigation.

“We received a report indicating that a payment card security incident may have occurred. We are taking this incident very seriously and immediately initiated our response protocol and an investigation is underway. We are currently focused on determining the locations affected and time frames involved. We are utilizing the experience of third parties who have helped other restaurants address similar issues and also working with the FBI and payment card networks. We understand that payment card network rules generally provide that individuals who timely report unauthorized charges to the bank that issued their card are not responsible for those charges,” Dickey’s said, responding to a SecurityWeek inquiry.

Related: Barnes & Noble Informs Customers of Cyberattack

Related: Carnival Corp. Confirms Personal Information Compromised in Ransomware Incident

Related: Personal Information of 46,000 U.S. Veterans Exposed in Data Breach

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.