American multinational financial services company Mastercard is investigating a massive data breach of a loyalty program in Germany, causing a leak of personal information of more than 90,000 customers.
The German loyalty program called Priceless Specials has been shut down due to data hacking. Mastercard immediately took actions to investigate since Monday, Aug. 19. However, there are reports that said user data from the breach has been circulating online.
The user data found in an online forum contained addresses, phone numbers, names, and credit card numbers of the said 90,000 customers. This has alerted Mastercard into conducting an investigation.
According to Teller Report, the loyalty program Priceless Specials was operated by a third-party service provider and this doesn’t affect Mastercard’s payment systems.
Mastercard said in a statement, “We do everything possible to find and resolve related issues.”
The company spokeswoman followed up, “We take data protection and security very seriously and therefore, do our utmost to investigate and solve the problem related to the operator of the specials platform in Germany.”
The company, as well as the German loyalty program provider, didn’t disclose any further details about the data breach incident. No particular suspects were named because the investigation is still ongoing.
Vulnerable to Attacks
The last time Mastercard dealt with a data breach was back in 2013 when US retail giant Target was attacked by hackers, exposing about 40 million credit and debit card information. Since the data breach, Target has yet to settle with Mastercard to reimburse damages caused by the compromised information of millions of customers.
A $20 million settlement was on the table and Mastercard plans to use this money to fix the wave of compromised cards.
Prior to this 2013 issue, Mastercard also had a huge data breach attack with TJX Cos. breach that exposed 100 million cards to fraud.
These data breach incidents have proved one thing and that is, Mastercard is vulnerable to hacking attacks. This recent news about the German loyalty program is another evidence that showed a flaw in the security measures of the financial company.
Mastercard customers are urged to check accounts for suspicious movements. The company also extends help to customers who were affected. Their hotlines are open for reports about fraudulent actions done using customer’s cards.
Mastercard’s second-quarter revenue hits $4.09 billion and shares price rose to $2 per share.
