Hannaford’s parent company announced Thursday that the personal information of some current and former employees as well as some customers was compromised during a cyber breach last November.
Ahold Delhaize — the Dutch-based company whose fleet of supermarkets in the U.S. includes Hannaford, Stop & Shop, Giant Food and Food Lion — said compromised information includes Social Security and driver’s license numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and health information. The information compromised varies per individual, according to the statement issued Thursday.
“The company is directly notifying affected individuals whose contact information was identified to make them aware of the matter and has also arranged to offer complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection services for two years,” the company’s statement says.
Christy Phillips-Brown, a spokesperson for Ahold Delhaize, wrote in an email Thursday night that “the vast majority of individuals being notified” are either current or former employees.
“We are also notifying certain other individuals, including some customers, whose personal information may have been contained in the internal business files affected by the issue,” she said. “Based on our review, we have no indication that customer payment or pharmacy systems were compromised in connection with the issue, and no customer credit card numbers were contained in the affected files.”
When asked how many Hannaford customers were affected by the breach, Phillips-Brown said the company is not disclosing that information.
Hannaford stores across Maine experienced a network outage in November, which affected customers’ ability to use credit cards at the store, access pharmacy services and place to-go orders.
The company detected the breach on Nov. 6 and, in its review of the incident, determined “an unauthorized third party obtained certain files from one of (Ahold’s) internal U.S. file repositories,” the company’s statement said.
The effects of the outage wore off at Hannaford locations, but slowly. While stores began accepting credit cards in the days after the breach, some online and phone services to fill prescriptions and make to-go orders took longer to reestablish.
The issue impacted multiple brands, the parent company said at the time, but many seemed to rebound quicker than Hannaford based on their website services being up and running within 48 hours of the incident.
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