ALBANY, N.Y. – Hundreds of credit unions throughout the East Coast were reissuing MasterCard and Visa credit and debit cards yesterday after they were notified by the two card companies of a new security breach that may have compromised millions of credit union and bank accounts.
The breach occurred at Hannaford Bros., a national supermarket chain based in Maine which also operates the Sweetbay stores in Florida. The company said yesterday as many as 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen from its database during the card authorization transmission process, affecting all of its 165 Hannaford stores in the Northeast and 105 Florida Sweetbay stores.
According to the Visa notice, the hackers stoles cardholders' names, account numbers and track 1 and track 2 data.
So far, about 1,800 cases of fraud have been reported.
Hannaford said it became aware of the data breach on Feb. 27.
Covera Card Solutions, a unit of the New York CU League, said it has sent out a fraud alert to notify its credit unions and has urged the credit unions to block the flagged cards and reissue them. "It’s in the very early stages of the investigation," one official told The Credit Union Journal.
Gordon Beebe, president of Fulton County FCU, in Gloversville, N.Y., said his credit union was contacted by Visa, as well as Covera and its cards processor of the breach, prompting them to block 1,100 Visa debit cards. "We were here till nine o’clock Friday night shutting them down," said Beebe.
Beebe said his credit union has not had any fraudulent activity on its cards yet, but he was told some of the compromised Visa cards were being accessed in Brazil and being used to make purchases at retailers in upstate New York between Dec. 7 and March 10.
First New York FCU, in Schenectady, as well as Sidney (N.Y.) FCU and North Country FCU, in Burlington, Vt., also reported they are reissuing cards because of the data breach.
Credit unions in other Northeast states are also reporting being notified by Visa of the new breach.
