The first week of 2020 is ending off with a data breach notice as Landry's Inc, owner of restaurants such as Morton's Steak House, Bubba Gump Shrimp and Joe's Crab Shack, discovered that a data breach may have occurred last year.
The company has put out a statement that announces the incident and notes that affected customers would have visited any of its restaurants between March 13, 2019, and Oct 17, 2019. There may have been another compromise, with a smaller group of restaurants, as early as January 2018. Landry's also operates a number of different ventures, including casinos, eateries, and hotel chains such as Westin and Holiday Inn. The incorporation says the number of consumers affected should be relatively low since it installed proper security precautions back in 2016 and the affected cards were involved due to human error.
What do they exactly mean by this?
Well back in 2016, Landry's installed a new mechanism on its payment terminals, that enforced encryption in its technology, to protect a customer's information from being stolen. This means that when a customer's card was swiped on this terminal, it was considered a secure transaction. The human error that occurred that led to the relatively low data breach happened when waitstaff would swipe credit cards on payment terminals that did not have this secure transaction technology. These payment terminals were only found in their bar and kitchen orders, circumventing would could have very well been a massive data breach. At the time of this writing, no numbers have been released to explain how many consumers are involved and some credit card numbers, expiration dates and internal verification codes are believed to be compromised.
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