U.S. fast-food chain Church’s Chicken has warned its customers of a possible data breach in its system. In a security notice on the organization’s website, Church’s Chicken states that a network breach was found near the end of October and specifically affects company restaurants. As a result, the following took place according to the report:
Our company immediately retained a leading cybersecurity forensics firm, to help us contain and remediate the activity, and launch an investigation to determine the extent to which information in Church’s systems may have been impacted. In addition, we are continuing to cooperate with federal law enforcement and have notified payment card networks and credit monitoring agencies.
According to the security notice, only company Church’s Chicken locations were affected by the data breach due to “multiple payment processing systems” that the company employs. The breach is localized, at least at the time of this article’s writing, to 11 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. This is due to the fact that Church’s Chicken asserts that “none of our franchised locations” were accessed in the breach. On the other hand, however, the investigation is not finished so it seems a bit premature to assume that breaches are not elsewhere. The company did not say how many restaurants were impacted by the data breach.
In the FAQ section of the notice, Church’s Chicken assures customers that they are safe to use credit cards at their establishments as they have “already taken steps to contain and remediate the incident, and our investigation has confirmed that any previous unauthorized third-party access is not ongoing.” Though the company is certain that no customer data has been accessed, they also state that bank statements should be monitored. Additionally, customers who order through delivery services like DoorDash, GrubHub, and others are not at risk because their payments are processed in systems belonging to those respective companies.
Featured image: Flickr / Steve Baker
