Hacker Gets Customer Data From 70 Wineries

July 18, 2015 — No business is safe. A hacker who understands that people of substance buy expensive wine and join wine clubs, has stolen names, addresses, birth dates, debit and credit card numbers of about 250,000 customers of wineries in Napa, plus two in Sonoma and one in Santa Cruz. The compromised cards are Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express.

The hacker got into eCellar Systems, a customer management program from Missing Link Networks of Calistoga. Cards could have been swiped at the winery, or used for online wine purchases or retained by a winery for wine club membership billing. On the bright side, if there is one, driver license numbers, CVV security numbers (the three digits on the back of the card or four on the front of AMEX cards) or PINs were not stolen.
The cybercrime came to light in late May. So far there have been no reports of fraud abuse traced to this theft but anyone who has purchased wine from any of the wineries listed below should monitor their credit card statements very carefully. In the meantime, serious costs in both time and real dollars will be incurred by the wineries which are obliged to notify all customers, hire attorneys and pay for credit reports for customers. Some of the wineries are better equipped than others to cope with the theft. But nobody, big or small, wants to spend time apologizing to good customers for cyberfraud, even if they weren’t at fault.