Popular restaurant chain Noodles & Company is reportedly investigating a possible credit card breach.
Asked to comment on the reports, Broomfield, Colo.-based Noodles & Company issued the following statement:
“We are currently investigating some unusual activity reported to us Tuesday, May 16, 2016 by our credit card processor. Once we received this report, we alerted law enforcement officials and we are working with third party forensic experts. Our investigation is ongoing and we will continue to share information.”
The news of this breach investigation comes among a fairly continual stream of card breaches at high street retailers, restaurant chains and hospitality firms. Wendy’s clarified a report recently that a credit card breach that began in the autumn of 2015 impacted 300 of its 5,500 locations.
Noodles & Company – another retail card breach?
U.S. banks have been transitioning to providing customers more secure chip-based credit and debit cards, and a greater number of retailers are installing checkout systems that can read customer card data off the chip. The chip encrypts the card data and makes it much more difficult and expensive for thieves to counterfeit cards.
However, most of these chip cards will still hold customer data in plain text on the card’s magnetic stripe (at least for a while), and U.S. merchants who continue to allow customers to swipe the stripe or who do not have chip card readers in place face shouldering all of the liability for any transactions later determined to be fraudulent. This could have a major impact on a company if they delay implementation of secure card technologies and they later encounter a breach.
While many U.S. retail establishments have already deployed chip-card readers at their checkout lines, relatively few have enabled those readers, and are still asking customers to swipe the stripe. For their part, Noodles & Company said that it is still in the process of testing and implementing chip-based readers.
“The ongoing program we have in place to aggressively test and implement chip-based systems across our network is moving forward,” the company said in a statement. “We are actively working with our key business partners to deploy this system as soon as they are ready.”
PLEASE NOTE – the Noodles & Company location pictured is a stock photo re-used from WikiPedia – we have no knowledge AT ALL that this particular location had a problem with their POS or card data breach. This photo was ONLY used because it was labeled as ‘Free to use with modification – and we do not intend to indicate that this location had a problem or not. We simply used the stock-photo. Please verify with your own location if they had a problem with a data-breach.