In December 2019, the Wawa data breach potentially affecting more than 850 of its branches in different locations.
Wawa Data Breach
Wawa- an American chain of convenience stores have experienced a data breach last December 2019. The breach was reported to their customer’s payment information. Customers who use either a debit or credit card.
It was said by their CEO, that the data breach potentially affecting more than 850 locations. Moreover, the compromising of records started on March 4 of the same year.
It was said in his letter, that the following information was compromised.
- Card numbers
- Expiration dates
- Cardholders’ names
On the other hand, there are some aspects of information in safe. Namely:
- Debit card PINs
- Credit card security codes
- Driver’s license information
It was until December 2019 for the data breach discovery. However, Wawa did not disclose the number of customers affected. Neither the number nor the kind of transactions.
2019 Breaches
The Wawa data breach was reported to be the worst among recorded data breaches of the year.
For instance, consider the following statistics:
- 2019 has 5,200 data breaches. As a result, almost 8 billion records have been compromised and exposed.
- As a result, this amounts to a ratio of 4:10 Americans
- Among all, malicious breaches are the most common and costly.
Quest Diagnostics- Data Breach
Another breach happened with the laboratory testing company- Quotes DIagnostics. It so happened in June.
It reports that its billing and collections vendor have exposed their records. Moreover, records amount to almost 12 million people. This vendor is the American Medical Collection Agency.
Moreover, these records include the following:
- Medical
- Personally identifiable information
- Financial
Federal Emergency Management Agency- Data Breach
In March of the same year, another incident occurred. This happened with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
- In addition, this incident has exposed more than 2 million records.
- These are sensitive records of natural disaster survivors.
- Moreover, it was said that it happened due to an accident.
Capital One- Data Breach
In July, Capital One was hit by a data breach also.
- Exposed records of more than 106 million customers
- Credit card information was accessed
- Also, Social Security numbers amounting to 140,000
- And nearly 80,000 bank account numbers
Us- Vulnerability
As we look over the records of the data breaches that happened in the past year. We ought to learn one thing. This was nicely stated by the vice president of Risk Based Security.
He states:
“We are often our own worst enemy..”
To this, everyone should be concerned. Because as cyber-attacks take more leaps in our era. We should also do the same.
Several factors pose these events to happen. But some factors prove to be common among all. That is, weak controls, and sometimes, human error.
The problem in breaches is that it takes months before it is discovered. This gives malicious actors much time with their play. All we can do is to boost defenses and encourage cyber awareness.
