Sears Holdings Corp announced late today that it has become the latest victim of a Point of Sale (POS) cyber-attack that probably resulted in the theft of some customer payment cards at its Kmart stores. This is the latest in a series of computer security breaches to hit U.S. companies in an ever growing number of retail exploits.
The U.S. Secret Service is involved and has confirmed it was investigating the breach, which happened in September and compromised the computer systems of Kmart. This division of Sears has approximate 1,200 stores across the US. This data breach did not affect the Sears department stores own department stores.
We have to wonder if the number of large retail vendors with upgraded and secured systems is a minority, or a majority – perhaps someone needs to look into this before the US economy is affected adversely by a lack of confidence in the credit-card processing on main-street.