Wawa Breach - Data On 30m Card Users For Sale

The payment card details of more than 30 million Americans, believed to have been stolen in a data breach at convenience store chain Wawa, have been put up for sale on the Dark Web. In late December 2019, fuel and convenience store chain Wawa Inc. said a nine-month-long breach of its payment card processing systems may have led to the theft of card data from customers who visited any of its 850 locations nationwide. 

Fraud experts now say the first batch of card data stolen from Wawa customers is being sold at one of the underground’s most popular crime shops, which claims to have 30 million records to peddle from a new nationwide breach of Wawa convenience stores and fuel stations that was first revealed in December.

The Joker’s Stash marketplace, one of the largest and most notorious dark web marketplaces for buying stolen payment card data, has advertised its next major breach since December 2019. The latest advertisement claimed that the cards would go live on January 27, 2020 at 11:00 PM EST. The full collection would include 30 million US records across more than 40 states, as well as over one million non-US records from more than 100 different countries.

While Wawa has the most of its locations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to an anysis by Deep Web experts at Gemini Advisory, the highest exposure of cards currently comes from Wawa locations in Florida, followed by Pennsylvania. Joker’s Stash began advertising in December that it would upload a sizeable collection of US, European and global cards, including geolocation data listing the cardholder’s state, city, and ZIP Code, on Jan. 27. 

The clandestine marketplace boasted that the collection would include 30 million US records across more than 40 states, as well as more than 1 million international records from more than 100 different countries.

While Wawa, which operates mainly in Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, DC, discovered the breach in December, bad actors were collecting data for almost 10 months using malware on Wawa’s in-store payment processing system, the company said at the time. 

The malware first infected in-store payment processing systems after March 4; by April 22, most store system, more than 850 in total, had been affected.

Overall, the Joker’s Stash collection suggests that the Wawa breach has the dubious honor of being among some of the largest payment-card breaches of all time, joining other, more widely known retail companies. While it remains to be seen the financial affect Wawa will feel from the breach, historically such incidents cost the companies affected a considerable sum of money. 

Home Depot, for instance, lost $40 million in investigation and recovery costs, and eventually agreed to pay $19 million in compensation for the more than 50 million cardholders affected by its 2014 breach. In the 2013 a mega-breach at Target Corp. fraudsters stole roughly 40 million cards of which between one and three million were actually sold.

Wawa says that it is aware the card data has surfaced and that it has alerted its payment processor, card brands, and issuers to "heighten fraud monitoring activities".

PaymentCardsandMobile:      Threatpost:           GeminiAdvisory:      Krebs On Security:   FinExtra: 

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