Vera Bradley is the latest retailer to fall victim to hackers, extent unknown

2016 has been a long year for retailers, with a number of them being relieved of customer data by hackers looking mostly for credit card information. Wendys, Eddie Bauer, Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Las Vegas and others have all been forced to step forward in an effort to protect customers, though largely done after the fact.

Now the latest victim has been announced as retailer Vera Bradley reveals it too has suffered a serious breach of its payment processing system.

The company is announcing in an official statement that "On September 15, 2016, Vera Bradley was provided information from law enforcement regarding a potential data security issue related to our retail store network. Upon learning this information, Vera Bradley immediately launched an investigation with the assistance of a leading computer security firm to aggressively gather facts and determine the scope of the issue and promptly notified the payment card networks. Findings from the investigation show unauthorized access to Vera Bradley's payment processing system and the installation of a program that looked for payment card data".

The breach seems to have only affected customers at retail locations, of which the chain has 159.  Those who need to pay attention to this include anyone who shopped between July 25 and Sept. 23. With that said, the company claims this does not affect every sale that took place during that time period.

The company acted relatively quickly when notified and did bring in FireEye to try and clean up the mess. The question now becomes how to prevent the situation from happening to begin with. That's a tougher one to answer.

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