On Jan. 29, 2016, Houston-based hospitality company Landry’s Inc. finally released a statement detailing the findings of its investigation – launched in Dec. 2015 – regarding a major credit card breach targeting a formerly unknown number of the company’s nationwide locations.
On Dec. 17, 2015, a well-known security blogger and reporter broke the story of this potentially massive and ongoing attack targeting Landry’s Inc., whose popular locations nationwide include Bubba Gump, Rainforest Café, Claim Jumper, McCormick & Schmick’s, and Morton’s Steakhouse. These are only some of the restaurants ultimately targeted by the attack. The company, under the leadership of Texas billionaire Tilman Ferttita, was quick to acknowledge the security breach. However, citing an immediate investigation, the company declined to make any statement regarding the scope of the attack’s timeframe or its number of affected locations and customers – information that the company had yet to provide until Friday’s statement.
Here’s what we know…
According to the statement, the attacks began targeting a number of the company’s “restaurants, food and beverage outlets, spas, entertainment destinations, and managed properties” as early as May 2014. The specific windows in which locations may have been affected were found to be from May 4, 2014 through March 15, 2015 and from May 5, 2015 through Dec. 3, 2015. In addition to the statement, Landry’s Inc. has published an online list of affected locations along with the respective timeframes in which each one was at risk, and while the company hasn’t specifically stated the number of locations breached, it’s not hard to do the math. The list includes multiple locations – sometimes in the dozens – of over 40 different restaurants nationwide.
The investigation began promptly after Landry’s Inc. was alerted to patterns of suspicious activity regarding payment cards that had been legitimately used at some of the company’s locations. Findings conclude that identity theft perpetrators succeeded in criminally installing a program onto payment processing devices at many of the company’s business locations and managed properties. The program was designed to collect data from the magnetic strips of payment cards swiped on affected devices, including the cardholder’s name and the card’s number, date of expiration and internal verification code. This information could be encoded onto new, fraudulent credit cards which could then be used to make purchases at big box retailers such as Best Buy and Target.
Landry’s Inc. claims that the investigation utilized the expertise of a leading cyber security expert and included cooperation with payment card networks and law enforcement to address the problem as swiftly and thoroughly as possible. In addition, end-to-end encryption measures have been implemented to prevent similar attacks in the future (a system that was already in development prior to the company’s knowledge of security breaches), and Landry’s Inc. continues to support law enforcement’s ongoing investigation. Potentially affected customers are encouraged to vigilantly watch their account activity and report any suspicious activity right away in order to have fraudulent charges waived.
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