Convenience store and gas station chain Rutter’s informed customers this week that their payment card information may have been stolen by cybercriminals.
Rutter’s has over 70 locations in Central Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland, and a vast majority of them are affected. One of the impacted stores is in West Virginia and the other 70 are in Pennsylvania.
The company said it discovered the breach recently, after being notified by a third-party that “there may have been unauthorized access to data from payment cards that were used at some Rutter’s locations.”
Rutter’s investigation revealed on January 14 that hackers had planted malware on payment processing systems, allowing them to obtain information from credit and debit cards used at point-of-sale (PoS) devices at fuel pumps and convenience stores.
The malware was designed to look for card track data, which includes cardholder name, card number, expiration date and internal verification code. However, the company says its convenience stores are equipped with PoS terminals that accept EMV cards. In the case of customers who inserted their EMV cards into the terminal’s chip reader, the malware may have only stolen the card number and expiration date.
Rutter’s also noted that the malware did not appear to have copied data from all the payment cards processed by the compromised systems.
“There is no indication that other customer information was accessed. Please note this incident is not the result of a handheld ‘skimmer’ being placed on a Rutter’s fuel pump,” Rutter’s said.
The company also pointed out that car washes, ATMs and lottery machines were not impacted.
The malware was mostly present between October 1, 2018, and May 29, 2019, but in some cases the theft of payment card data may have started on August 30, 2018, or September 20, 2018. The list of affected stores and the timeframe when the malware was present are listed on the Rutter’s website.
Visa warned in December that sophisticated cybercrime groups had been targeting North American gas stations with PoS malware.
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