HARRISBURG—Attorney General Josh Shapiro today announced an $8 million agreement with Wawa to resolve a December 2019 data breach that compromised approximately 34 million payment cards used across all Wawa stores. AG Shapiro, along with acting New Jersey AG Matthew J. Platkin, led a coalition of seven attorneys general in investigating the breach. This is the third largest attorneys general credit card breach settlement behind Target and The Home Depot. Pennsylvania will collect $2,525,732 through this settlement.
AG Shapiro immediately opened an investigation after Wawa proactively notified his Office that the company experienced a data security incident. The investigation concluded that Wawa failed to employ reasonable security measures, which allowed hackers to gain access to Wawa’s network and deployed malware on the company’s payment processing servers at its stores. The malware allowed the hackers to obtain the payment card information of Wawa customers between April 18, 2019 and December 12, 2019. In Pennsylvania, approximately 9.1 million payment cards were potentially exposed to the hacker.
“Today’s settlement will help protect Pennsylvanians personal information going forward and will hold Wawa accountable for the data breach that occurred on their watch,” AG General Shapiro said. “Thanks to this work Wawa will adopt new corporate policies to deter data breaches in the future. Every corporation that does business in Pennsylvania needs to stay alert and protect their customer’s personal data or they will have to answer to my office.”
In addition to the $8 million total payment to the states, Wawa has agreed to implement and maintain a series of data security practices designed to strengthen its information security program and safeguard the personal information of consumers.
Specific information security provisions agreed to in the settlement include:
- Maintaining a comprehensive information security program designed to protect consumers’ sensitive personal information;
- Providing resources necessary to fully implement the company’s information security program;
- Providing appropriate security awareness and privacy training to all personnel who have key responsibilities for implementation and oversight of the information security program
- Employing specific security safeguards with respect to logging and monitoring, access controls, file integrity monitoring, firewalls, encryption, comprehensive risk assessments, penetration testing, intrusion detection, and vendor account management; and
- Consistent with previous state data breach settlements, the company will undergo a post settlement information security assessment which in part will evaluate its implementation of the agreed upon information security program.
Joining Attorney General Shapiro in the investigation and today’s settlement are the attorneys general of Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, and District of Columbia.
The coalition’s investigation and settlement was led by Senior Deputy Attorney General Timothy R. Murphy.
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