The parent company that controls restaurants Planet Hollywood, Buca di Beppo, Earl of Sandwich, Chicken Guy!, Mixology and Tequila Taqueria has revealed a 10 month data breach affecting over 2 million of their customers who may have had their payment information stolen when eating at one of their outlets.
Security researchers at KrebsOnSecurity notified Italian chain Buca di Beppo of a potential security breach after discovering two million of their customer’s credit card details being sold by criminals on the Internet. That was in February 2019.
Last week, parent company Earl Enterprises admitted to a breach and revealed cyber crooks had installed malware onto the point-of-sale payment systems at a number of their locations that harvested credit card information. The amount of card information that was stolen is theoretically enough to allow any buyers with the technical know-how to create cloned cards based on that information.
Buca di Beppo appears to be the most significantly hit, with all of its stores across the United States affected.
The malware appears to have been active on many of the point-of-sale payment systems between May 2018 and March 2019, meaning anyone who has eaten at any of the aforementioned locations between those dates may have had their payment information stolen if they paid by plastic.
If you’ve eaten at one or more of these locations, you can go to an online webpage set up by Earl Enterprises which lists affected outlets and the corresponding dates where malware was present. The page also contains lots of advice about what to do if you may have been compromised through this breach.
And if you think you were affected, remember to keep a close eye on those bank statements, looking out for any unusual activity. Contact your card issuer if you were affected – providing you report any fraudulent charges in a timely manner, they should be refunded.