It’s been a rough week for Microsoft employees on the security front. The security breach reported yesterday by Premera Blue Cross hit home at the Redmond company, which uses Premera as its employee insurance provider.
Now it turns out that Microsoft is also a customer of point-of-sale technology company NEXTEP, which reported a credit card breach of its own last week, traced to its terminals at a restaurant chain.
Responding to GeekWire’s inquiry today, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed that the company disabled its NEXTEP self-serve payment and ordering kiosks at nine Microsoft cafeterias last week after learning about the breach. The investigation is ongoing, but based on the initial findings, the company doesn’t believe that any employee credit cards or personal information were compromised.
The nine locations represented a small portion of the 43 cafeterias across the Microsoft campus. Employees were still able to pay via staffed registers in the cafeterias.
“We take this kind of thing seriously — that’s why we were so quick in taking down those kiosks,” said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman, noting that the company is exploring alternative payment systems.
NEXTEP offers a Windows tablet-based point-of-sale system, as you would expect from a company that serves as a vendor to Microsoft.
The breach was discovered through a pattern of fraud on credit cards used at the Zoup restaurant chain. In an statement about the breach to journalist Brian Krebs, NEXTEP President Tommy Woycik said the company didn’t believe all of its customers were impacted by the security breach.
“NEXTEP was recently notified by law enforcement that the security of the systems at some of our customer locations may have been compromised,” Woycik said in the statement. “NEXTEP immediately launched an investigation in cooperation with law enforcement and data security experts we retained to determine the root cause and remediate the issue. We do know that this is NOT affecting all NEXTEP customers, and we have been working with our customers to ensure that any issues are addressed.”
