Do you like to eat at Dickey's BBQ? 3,000,000 credit cards compromised.

[thewayne]

Mainly in California and Arizona. Dickey's is a franchised operation, and as franchisees can choose their point of sale operation, it is most likely that a downstream credit card operator was compromised.

From the article, one of the consultants brought in said "The financial institutions we’ve been working with have already seen a significant amount of fraud related to these cards,” and "data indicated some 156 Dickey’s locations across 30 states likely had payment systems compromised by card-stealing malware, with the highest exposure in California and Arizona. Gemini puts the exposure window between July 2019 and August 2020.

Apparently with the emphasis in hardening systems against ransomware, people have been neglecting converting over to chip payment and the swiping of cards is notorious for being vulnerable to card theft.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/10/breach-at-dickeys-bbq-smokes-3m-cards/

Comments

[devilc]

Meep.

Of course the CC payment processing companies have not been helpful at all. Instead of just dispatching everybody a new terminal and telling them to plug it in, nope, you can buy a new terminal.

Which means that a lot of small businesses, which run on tight margins, are like, "nope, until it stops working or you no longer support it, I'm using it."

The only reason my husband switched to a chip system is he got a whole new CC processor (was offered better terms and switched).

[silveradept]

That's not good, but also as was mentioned above, it's not like the people who have to use these terminals are going to be able to upgrade themselves with the margins they have. If it's important enough for the card companies to wash their hands of any fraud that happens from stripes, they can afford to take whatever hit their profits will take to make it possible for everyone to get up to the standard. It's not like they're not making money hand-over-fist anyway.

[thewayne]

I wrote a nice little rant in reply to your reply, and decided to post it as a new blog post.

[moxie_man]

Dickey's, like a lot of other chain franchises, attempted to come to Maine, but quickly failed. Other failures include (but not inclusive):
Krispy Kream
Red Lobster (obviously--how could they compete with all the mom and pop places here that feature lobster?)
Tim Horton's (in the southern half of the state, sadly)

[thewayne]

I went to a Tim's at a mall in Portland back in '12?  Just to say that I'd had a donut at a Tim's.  I was not impressed. :-) Krispy Kream, if fresh, is pretty good.  They sprouted like may flies in Phoenix, and died.  They paid cash to build-out and expand, and what do you know - suddenly they were cash poor!  Almost destroyed the corp.  How they thought paying cash to expand was a good idea rather than having people buy franchises and have them take the risk, I do not know.

Hard to imagine the hubris of Red Lobster trying to open in Maine!  We eat there on occasion, and some of their seafood is decent.  But not Maine decent.  Two of my wife's sisters live in Cape Elizabeth, there's a little lobster roll shack near the beach there that does just wonderful rolls.  I hope we can go there maybe next year after a vaccine becomes available, it'll be almost a decade since we've been there and last seen them. When we were in Maine in '12, they took us out for our anniversary to a seafood restaurant on a waterfront.  Man, that was so nice.  I had a seabass that was wonderful.  We also went to another small restaurant that I very much like and I had THE BEST bacon cheeseburger that I have ever had.  I hope they've survived the current plague.

[moxie_man]

When your chain donut choices are Dunkin (which dropped donut from their name for a very good reason) and Timmy's, Timmy's wins (barely).

Let's see about that Cape E. seafood shack near the beach. Perhaps it is The Lobster Shack at Two Lights? I've taken my wife there. Haddock basket for me as I can't eat shellfish. They close for the season on 10/25. So the good news is they survived this year at least.

Seafood restaurant on the waterfront is too vague to go by. One of the popular places on the Portland waterfront for seafood would be Demillo's Floating Restaurant, but other than that, I'd need more info to look into it for you. Sadly, there are a lot of smaller places that haven't pulled through or may not survive the off season this winter.