Sears Holdings Corp.’s share price up, discount chain Kmart to offer free credit monitoring to customers after suffering a data breach

The discount chain of Sears Holdings corp., Kmart, announced that its customers will be provided with free credit monitoring at a time when the chain is investigating a hacker attack, which was detected last week.

The President of Kmart – Mr. Alasdair James – said in the statement, cited by BBC: “I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our members and customers.”

The computer-hacker breach was detected on October 9th by the companys information-technology team. In addition, the damages from the breach, which occurred at the beginning of September, are being evaluated by a security firm. Sears Kmart chain said that the breach probably exposed its clients payment-card data to risk.

The attack was reported to have affected about 1 200 stores of Kmart. The initial investigation of the company suggests that the hackers, who organised the attack managed to steal credit and debit card numbers, but it is not yet clear how many customers, and respectively, cards, have been affected by the breach. However, Kmart noted that no personal information of its clients, such as social security numbers, pin codes and e-mail addresses have been stolen. The data breach was also confirmed by the U.S. Secret Service, which also explained that it is taking part into the investigation.

As reported by Bloomberg, Kmart explained in its filing: “According to the security experts Kmart has been working with, the Kmart store payment data systems were infected with a form of malware that was undetectable by current anti-virus systems. Kmart was able to quickly remove the malware. However, Kmart believes certain debit and credit card numbers have been compromised.”

The hacker attack made Sears chain a part of other U.S.-based companies such as Home Depot Inc., Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus Group Ltd, which have recently become a target of data breaches. All of them were forced to increase their database and credit-card processing security.

Sears Holdings Corp. was 0.48% up to trade at $24.90 per share today, marking a one-year decrease of 44.01%. The company is valued at $2.64 billion. According to CNN Money, the 2 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Sears Holdings Corp. have a median target of $20.00, with a high estimate of $20.00 and a low estimate of $20.00. The median estimate represents a -20.79% decrease from the last price of $25.25.