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| ECommerce Payments |
I've always thought the wine industry should be the most uninteresting industry for cybercrime. Wineries have lots of inventory to steal, but anyone who works in this business knows there isn't much cash to take. It all gets used up in barrels, bottles, inventory, and facilities.
Who and even more to the point, why would anyone bother to hack into a winery? It's not like there are any huge IP secrets to take. North Korea doesn't care about the 2015 vintage. Chinese spies have to get paid more to focus on our Government's and defense contractor's systems rather than messing with wineries I'd think. Pre-pubescent teenagers trying to hack winery computer systems would have more fun trying to hack celebrities' personal sites or play
World of Warcraft. That's where young people can really experience virtual power and control.
Besides, the wine business is really a bitty industry; one full of mom and pop shops.
So why would anyone bother to try and hack into a winery when there seem to be so many other far more interesting and larger industry targets out there to probe?
That question is no longer academic because today - right this second,
hundreds of people in probably 100 separate companies are cleaning up after the personal information of 250,000 winery customers was hacked in a recent data breach. [i]
This is a really big deal. While I've heard no mention of the cost of this, it has to easily be millions of dollars in the aggregate given the number of businesses and impacted people who are cleaning up the mess thus far. And those losses are before considering any fraudulent credit card purchases which may have happened or may still happen.
