Sally Beauty Holdings, a multi-billion dollar beauty products retailer with 3,300 stores around the world including 2,600 in the United States has announced that it has suffered a security breach which appears to have compromised the credit cards and debit cards of hundreds of thousands of its customers.  Unlike the  recent data breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels, it appears that Sally Beauty’s own cyber defense technology may have detected the intrusion at the same time that a number of banks identified Sally Beauty Supply as being a victim of a data breach.  In the Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels data breaches it was banks that monitored credit cards that first noticed the pattern of stolen cards being tied to the particular retailers.  Recently, on black market criminal websites large numbers of stolen credit cards and debit cards tied to use at Sally Beauty were being offered for sale.  Investigators are now theorizing that it is the same criminals that are behind all of these recent retail breaches and we all should expect more retail breaches in the upcoming days and weeks ahead.

TIPS

If you have shopped at Sally Beauty Supply in the last few months and used a credit or debit card, you should monitor the use of your card carefully for evidence that your card was among those stolen.  You may wish to change your credit card and debit card in order to be ahead of the game.  This is also a good time to remind you that you should not use your debit card for retail purchases.  Limit its use to ATM withdrawals because you do not get the same consumer protections if your debit card is breached that you would have if your credit card is stolen.  The inconvenience to you even if you do not actually lose money as a result of a debit card data breach is far worse than you would suffer with a stolen credit card.  You also may wish to protect yourself further by putting a credit freeze on your credit report so that even if an identity thief manages to get access to your personal information sufficient to gain access to your credit report, they will not be able to use the credit report because it will be PIN protected and frozen.  You can find instructions as to how to put a credit freeze on your credit report on the right hand side of this page of Scamicide.