Supermarket loses 4.2 million credit card details

This news reduces our confidence index again of using credit card in major supermarkets. One of the reason that this happened is due to illegal access to the Hannaford Supermarket computer system during the card transmission of card authorisation.The incidents affected all 165 Hannaford stores, 106 Sweetbay stores in Florida, and some independently-owned retailers in New England that use Hannaford's payment systems. CEO, Ronald C of Hannnaford had announced this incident publicly and apologies for such incident.

For details, please see here:http://www.hannaford.com/Contents/News_Events/News/News.shtml

Credit card security issue is not new in information security domain, many technologies exist to tackle this area and yet we are still hearing the same incident again and again. To my experience, many times, senior management will not buy in these technologies unless it really happened. We are playing the game of possibility and no one is able to accurately tell you what that possibility rate is. So safe better than sorry, invest in security!