Have you — or your kids — made a purchase online at GameStop.com recently?
If you made a purchase on the site anytime between September 2016 and February of this year, we suggest you comb through your credit card statements for any charges that aren’t yours.
GameStop, a household name among video game enthusiasts, is investigating reports that hackers stole credit card and customer data from its website during the aforementioned timeframe.
In a statement posted on its website, www.gamestop.com, GameStop acknowledged that it recently received information from a third party about the breach.
Though unnamed, the third party is likely Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity.com who broke the story.
“GameStop recently received notification from a third party that it believed payment card data from cards used on the GameStop.com website was being offered for sale on a website,” according to the statement.
“That day a leading security firm was engaged to investigate these claims. GameStop has and will continue to work non-stop to address this report and take appropriate measures to eradicate any issue that may be identified,” the statement continued.
According to Krebs, two financial industry sources “received alerts from a credit card processor stating that GameStop.com was likely compromised by intruders between mid-September 2016 and the first week of February 2017.”
The sources claim the compromised data includes the customer card number, expiration date, name, address and card verification value (the three-digit security code usually found on the back of the card).
GameStop has yet to confirm the timeframe. And there’s no word yet on how many cards might have been compromised as a result of the breach. We expect the number to be fairly high considering GameStop.com is a very popular website. It ranks 269th most popular site in the United States, according to Alexa.com, a website that tracks such stats.
According to this Yahoo Finance story, GameStop shares dropped 1% the afternoon it admitted the breach.
“The report comes at a difficult time for GameStop: Its stock price has depreciated 25.6% over the last 12 months and last month said it plans to close about 150 stores,” writes David Lieberman in the piece.
Somehow we doubt scorned customers will be very sympathetic to the company’s plight.
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