14 DAY TRIAL // Acer, a Taiwanese multinational hardware and electronics corporation, is preparing to notify customers of a data breach the company suffered via its online store.
The company announces that users who accessed its e-commerce site between May 12, 2015, and April 28, 2016, may have had their information compromised due to the unauthorized access of a third-party.
Intruder had access to credit card numbers
Acer is not saying how many users were affected by the intrusion but reveals that data such as names, addresses, payment card numbers, card expiration dates, and three-digit security codes (CVV numbers) may have been compromised. The company says that they don't collect Social Security numbers.
Following an investigation by their staff and a team of outside cyber-security experts, Acer has stated that they didn't find any evidence of the attacker gaining access to user login credentials.
Acer is running its store on the Magento Enterprise platform, but they claimed they identified the issue, and it was a problem with one of their third-party payment processing systems. The company took steps to remediate the issue, and later notified the credit card payment processor.
Acer is now notifying affected customers
Following US laws, the Taiwanese company is now starting to inform all affected US citizens, but customers from other countries may be concerned as well if they used the Acer store.
Below is a copy of the company's data breach notice that was submitted to the California Attorney General’s Office.
Last month, Google suffered a data breach as well, and the company had to notify its employees after an executive of a third-party company that provides Google with unspecified benefits had inadvertently sent out an email with Google employee details to the wrong person.
UPDATE: An Acer representative told Softpedia that only about 34,500 customers were affected by this issue. The affected customers were all in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico.