Credit Card Data Breaches Popping Up Again

Data breaches have resulted in costly fines, notifications and beefed up security precautions for many of the largest payment card issuers and companies that accept cards or store customer information. After a lull in announced breach activity, two reported incidents this week have put data security back into the news.

Washington Trust Co., a Westerly, R.I. bank that is a subsidiary of $2.5 billion Washington Trust Bancorp, Inc., notified about 1,000 holders of its bank cards that their accounts may have been compromised as the result of an unspecified breach involving MasterCard, according to an Associated Press report. Bank officials were unavailable for comment.

The breach follows a similar small incident involving the Best Western hotel chain, which reported that hackers accessed the personal data of just 10 guests at a hotel in Germany.

That's three fewer than the 13 customer records that Best Western International Inc. initially said had been exposed, and a far cry from the 8 million stolen records reported by the Glasgow Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper that broke the news of the breach on Sunday.

The story in the Sunday Herald claimed that hackers had made off with the credit card records and other data of all customers who had stayed at one of Best Western's 1,312 European hotels this year and in 2007. The paper said the breach was perpetrated last Thursday by a hitherto unknown Indian hacker.