British financial company HSBC notified 180,000 people in the U.S. that their credit information may have been stolen.
The bank noted that customers who used its General Motors-branded MasterCard at a retail store might have had their personal information exposed to thieves.
HSBC did not release the name of the store, but news reports have suggested it is the Ralph Lauren Polo store.
Feeling Exposed
HSBC pointed to an older point-of-sale system and bad database management as the main culprits.
The company mailed notification letters to most of the affected shoppers, with the rest of the letters to be sent this week, and offered to replace all customer  credit cards.
In revealing the security breach , HSBC said that the point-of-sale systems retained credit information instead of destroying it after the information was sent to designated banks.
Since the system stored data from between June 2002 to December 2004, a high number of individuals were affected by possible theft of the retailer's data stores.
Digital Dilemma
The HSBC situation highlights the issues inherent in storing large amounts of customer data, whether inadvertently or not.
Earlier this week, Reed Elsevier admitted that over 300,000 records on LexisNexis databases were exposed.
ChoicePoint, a credit check company, had a similar admission in February, noting that 145,000 records were exposed to thieves.
Across the Pond
HSBC's disclosure comes only a month after banking customers in the UK were warned about a pharming threat that redirected users to fraudulent banking and finance sites. Affected banks were Barclays, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and NatWest.
That round of attacks was blamed on a virus known as Troj/BankAsh-A, which would get downloaded as an e-mail attachment and then lie dormant until a user attempted to visit a banking site.
Seeing multiple financial institutions targeted was not surprising, according to Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.
"It used to be just the top two or three banks that were targets for identity theft attacks," he said. "But now it's even small banks, and it doesn't matter where they are in the world."
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