Sally Beauty confirmed it is investigating a possible breach of its computer systems just over a year after disclosing another hacking that affected the records of more than 25,000 of the beauty-supplies retailer’s customers.
The company said Monday morning it is looking into “reports of unusual activity” on payment cards used at some of Sally Beauty’s (SBH) U.S. Stores. “Since learning of these reports, we have been working with law enforcement and our credit card processor and have launched a comprehensive investigation with the help of a leading third-party forensics expert to aggressively gather facts while working to ensure our customers are protected,” the company said in a statement.
Monday’s statement emphasized that it is too early to tell whether the possible breach affected customer data. Any customers who have concerns about the security of their payment information were directed to call a customer service phone number. Denton, Texas-based Sally Beauty has 4,900 global locations, including 2,700 stores in the U.S., and has annual revenue of $3.8 billion.
In March 2014, Sally Beauty revealed that hackers had stolen sensitive information about thousands of customers, including payment card numbers and security codes. To investigate last year’s hack, the company enlisted the forensics unit of Verizon Enterprise Solutions and also worked with the U.S. Secret Service.
The latest potential breach of Sally Beauty would be the most recent in a string of high-profile corporate data breaches over the past few years. Earlier this year, health insurers Anthem (ANTM) and Premera Blue Cross were hit by separate hackings that affected millions of customers, while Target (TGT) recently agreed to pay $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit related to a high-profile breach that hit the retailer in 2013.
While the frequency of major corporate breaches seems to have picked up in recent years, Sally Beauty would still represent one of the few companies to suffer multiple hacks in a short period of time. Hotel operator White Lodging Services recently confirmed its second breach in under a year when the company discovered hackers had stolen information from credit and debit cards used at ten U.S. Locations in the past year.
As Coins2Day has noted recently, there is some debate over the cost of data breaches to large corporations, with some analyses finding that companies lose hundreds of dollars for each stolen customer record while others say that corporations merely lose pennies per record.
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