Stolen Data and Fraud: The Hannaford Brothers Data Breach (Cases) (Case Study‪)‬

THE DATA THEFT The first indication that Hannaford Brothers had a problem came on February 27, 2008 when they were notified by First Data--which handles transactions for Discover and American Express--about a high number of fraudulent charges on credit cards which had previously been used at Hannaford stores (Wickenheiser, 2008). Although Hannaford Brothers had never before been the victim of a data breach, they were now in the middle of an ongoing theft of customer information that would be one of the most publicized of2008 and ultimately lead to millions of their customers' credit card data being stolen. After being alerted by First Data, Hannaford Brothers notified the Secret Service and assembled a team of over thirty computer forensic experts to find the source of the data leak. At this point Hannaford Brothers had not notified the public and did not know how the data was being stolen. As they were trying to determine how the theft was occurring one thing was very clear: they had to figure it out quickly. The longer they took, the more customer data was being stolen. They had to find out what data was being stolen, how the thieves were stealing it and they had to do it fast.