Staples May Be Latest Data Breach Victim

The Framingham, Mass., retailer is "investigating a potential issue"

It sounded like another “here we go again” report Tuesday, another giant retailer reporting another giant data breach – this time, Staples, the office and technology supply store based in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Initial reports are that an unknown number of credit and debit cards may have been breached by a version of the same type of point-of-sale machine malicious software that’s also been used to swipe charge card and personal data from Target, Home Depot, K-Mart, and even Dairy Queen. Staples stores in the New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia were being eyed as a potential source of the breach.

Coming days after megabank JP Morgan Chase reported having 83 million customers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers hacked, Robert Anderson Jr., assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, warned that "we’re in the days when someone can commit 15,000 bank robberies in about a minute from the basement of their apartment."

Staples senior public relations manager Mark Cautela said in a media statement: "Staples is in the process of investigating a potential issue involving credit card data and has contacted law enforcement … We take the protection of customer information very seriously, and are working to resolve the situation."

One indication that the hack may not prove a huge disaster for Staples, or that investors seemed to have priced the cost of these breaches into big retailers’ stocks: Shares of Staples stock actually closed up 16 cents Tuesday, or 1.3 percent, at $12.46 per share in Nasdaq trading.

With video editor Lauren Kleciak 

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