Attention Kmart Shoppers! Your credit card information may have been stolen. The parent company, Sears Holdings has announced in a blog post that payment cards used at some of their brick and mortar Kmart stores may have been compromised recently. They have not disclosed which locations were affected or how many shoppers may have been victims either. It’s been reported that malware undetectable by antimalware software infiltrated a point of sale (POS) system.
While they state there is no evidence of misuse of any card numbers, anyone who has shopped at any of their stores recently should be extra diligent at monitoring payment card charges for at least the next year. If it is possible, it’s recommended to review them more often than once a month when the statement arrives. Anything that looks suspicious should be reported to the card issuer immediately for resolution.
In addition, many card issues are offering a notification service now. Customers can set a charge limit and if any purchase is above it, either an email, text, or phone call is placed alerting them. That is additional protection. Set the limit at something that makes sense for your spending habits. If you rarely charge more than $100 at a time, that might be a good number at which to start for your notifications. If you rarely charge more than $25, that might be your target.
No personally identifiable information (PII) was accessed as part of this intrusion, according to the blog posts. Sears Holdings representatives believe that the card numbers were. However, all of the Kmart stores are EMV compliant, so they also suspect the information the intruders were able to captures is of limited use. That said, not all financial institutions have issued the chip enabled cards. Visa has stated that only 58% of Visa cardholders have the EMV chip cards. Likely, the customers who swiped the magnetic strips on their cards are the ones at risk.
Neither Kmart nor Sears customers were affected by this, according to statements, but an investigation is ongoing.
This is not the first time Kmart has made the news for a data breach. In 2014, the company announced a similar intrusion and blamed malware that was undetectable by their antimalware software.
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