UK based Health and Pharmacy retailer ‘Boots’ has made it official that it has halted its customers from purchasing products on its website using its loyalty card reward points as hackers reportedly hacked passwords of its 140,000 customers of the company’s 14.4 million Advantage Card Holders.
Investigation launched by BOOTS has revealed that hackers could use the passwords of their users if they had a habit of reusing the same passwords on multiple web service platforms.
Boots UK which holds several chemist stores had assured that none of its systems were compromised in the attack and only the info related to its Loyalty cards was leaked to hackers.
All the customers who have fallen prey to the data breach will get an official intimation from the health and beauty retailer by this month’s end. And those whose Advantage Card Points were fraudulently used (If/when proven) will be replaced thereafter.
Note 1- In the year 1197, Boots started to reward its customers with Advantage card points for spending on shopping. And since then it is allowing them to collect 4 points on every £1 they spend.
Note 2- A similar kind of incident took place with Tesco last year when it learned that the card details of its 600,000 Cardholders were stolen by hackers.
Note 3- All Advantage Card Holders of Boots are being advised to visit their website and reset their passwords. And it is better if the users start using a combination of Alpha-numeric characters induced by one or two special characters while building their passwords which has to be a minimum of 10 characters.
