BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — New York Attorney General Letitia James has secured $400,000 from Wegmans after a data breach exposed the personal information of over three million customers, including over 830,000 New Yorkers.
In June 2021 Wegmans notified its customers of a database configuration issue that left customer information open to potential outside access.
According to Wegmans the information involved was:
- Names
- Addresses
- Phone numbers
- Birth dates
- Shoppers Club numbers
- Email addresses and passwords to Wegmans.com accounts
According to Wegmans, the actual characters of the passwords were not contained in the databases and "social security numbers were not impacted (Wegmans does not collect this information from its customers) nor was any payment card or banking information involved."
“Wegmans failed to safely store and seal its consumers’ personal information, instead it left sensitive information out in the open for years. Today, Wegmans is paying the price for recklessly handling and exposing millions of consumers’ personal information on the internet. In the 21st century, there’s no excuse for companies to have poor cybersecurity systems and practices that hurt consumers.”
As a result of AG James' action, Wegmans is required to pay New York $400,000 in penalties and must do the following:
- Maintaining a comprehensive information security program that includes regular updates to keep pace with changes in technology and security threats and reporting security risks to the company's leadership;
- Maintaining appropriate asset management practices, including maintaining an inventory of all cloud assets;
- Establishing policies and procedures to ensure all cloud assets containing personal information have appropriate access controls to limit access to such information;
- Developing a penetration testing program that includes at least one annual comprehensive penetration test of Wegmans’ cloud environment;
- Implementing centralized logging and monitoring of cloud asset activity, including logs that are readily accessible for a period of at least 90 days and stored for at least one year from the date the activity was logged;
- Establishing appropriate password policies and procedures for customer accounts, including hashing stored passwords with a hashing algorithm and salting policy commensurate with NIST standards, encouraging customers to use strong passwords, educating customers on the benefits of multifactor authentication, and prohibiting password reuse;
- Maintaining a reasonable vulnerability disclosure program that allows third parties, such as security researchers, to disclose vulnerabilities;
- Establishing appropriate practices for customer account management and authentication, including notice, a security challenge, or re-authentication for account changes; and,
- Updating its data collection and retention practices, including only collecting a customer’s personal information when there is a reasonable business purpose for collection and deleting personal information when there is no longer a reasonable business purpose to retain such information — for information collected prior to the effective date of the agreement, Wegmans will permanently delete all personal information for which no reasonable purpose exists within 240 days of the effective date.
