PriceSmart is allegedly the latest victim of ransomware group ALPHV, also known as Black Cat.
The disclosure was made yesterday by cybersecurity firm Falcon Feeds.IO, on its X account, formerly known as Twitter.
Falcon Feeds.IO also recently revealed that the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) was hacked just about two weeks ago.
The post allegedly from the ransomware group showed a screenshot from Sunday with PriceSmart’s logo timestamped 7.48 a.m. which stated: “More than 500gb gigabytes of sensitive data, clients and employees’ data we have.”
Up to yesterday evening when the Express checked the company’s news page there were no updates addressing the issue.
Last month PriceSmart made headlines when customers complained that charges to their credit cards were duplicated.
An investigation was launched into the matter and Republic Bank took responsibility for the transactions, citing technical challenges with its credit card processing system.
In a media release on October 20, president and managing director of Republic Bank, Nigel Baptiste, stated that he regretted the negative sentiments directed towards PriceSmart and assured that the company was not at fault in the matter.
According to technewstt.com, the online shopping portal for Courts, ShopCourts, was also hacked by the ransomware group.
The image accompanying that article showed the Courts logo and read “database leaked” for shopcourts.com and was dated 2023.
However, a media release from Unicomer (Trinidad) Ltd yesterday promptly denied that there were any recent breaches to its online portal.
It stated that a data breach was identified on its old e-Commerce Platform www.shopcourts.com last year which was replaced in September 2023 with a new one, www.courts.com. The release stated that the company enforced measures and strengthened its security levels to better secure the platform and protect against future data breaches.
E-commerce customers were assured that none of their payment methods and password information were exposed in the incident from the previous e-commerce platform, according to the release. It also added that customers who did not use the e-commerce platform were not impacted.
On October 9, State-owned Telecommunications Service of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) was infected with ransomware and approximately six gigabytes (GB) of data was reportedly stolen.
That hack was also announced by Falcon Feeds.IO on its X account, formerly known as Twitter.
According to the screenshot which accompanied that post, the information that was taken in the hack included “customers’ lines, ID scans, GitLab projects and database dumps”.
