Whole Foods Becomes One of the Latest Major Card Breach Victims

Card breaches are, increasingly, a way of life in the mobile payments circuit. Sure, we’d rather these kinds of things not happen to begin with, but with so much money at stake, it’s just as easy to see why card breaches happen to begin with. Whole Foods recently took just such a breach on the chin, though reports suggest the breach may not be all that widespread.

Reports note that the payment card information illegally accessed was primarily that that came from full-service restaurants and taprooms contained within Whole Foods outlets, which use a different point-of-sale (POS) system than Whole Foods proper users. Thus, those who only used their card at the store’s checkout points and not at a restaurant or taproom within are likely exempt from this particular issue.

Whole Foods started in with an investigation once the breach was discovered, reports note. It called in a major cybersecurity firm to investigate, and also alerted law enforcement authorities, which is pretty much everything that a company should do in such a situation. Those who remember that Whole Foods was bought by Amazon recently, and are wondering about the health of those accounts, need not be concerned; the two systems haven’t been connected and may not be for some time.

Better news yet is only a comparative handful of Whole Foods locations actually have these extra features, so chances are most will never even come in contact with such outlets to pose a risk at all. Still though, for anyone who did—and just as a general proviso—it’s important to monitor accounts for potential fraud just to make sure. It’s also not the best of optics for Amazon, who will need all the positive press it can get going into the holiday shopping season. The fallout from this will likely be minimal, of course, but any bad press is still bad press.

While this particular breach may not do a lot of damage by itself, any breach is a bad one, and one that its victims would likely prefer never have happened. So hopefully, with some vigilance on our part, and on the vendors’ part, we can keep these to a minimum, and reduce the impact that follows when they do happen.