Breach at Dickey’s Barbecue Pit compromises 3 million Cards

Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, the largest barbecue restaurant chain in the US, suffered a POS breach, card details for 3 Million customers were posted online.

Dickey’s Barbecue Pit is a family-owned American barbecue restaurant chain, the company suffered a POS breach and card details of more than three million customers have been posted on the carding portal Joker’s Stash.

The huge trove of payment card data was spotted by researchers from the cyber-security firm Gemini Advisory.

The Joker’s Stash dark web marketplace is one of the most popular carding websites, it is known for advertising and card details from major breaches.

The card details of Dickey’s Barbecue Pit‘s customers were included in a dump titled “BLAZINGSUN.” JokerStash originally claimed that the breach would be available in August, then again in September, and finally it was posted online on October 12.

“Gemini Advisory determined that the compromised point of purchase (CPP) was Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, a US-based restaurant franchise.” reads the post published by Gemini Advisory.

“The advertisement claimed that BLAZINGSUN would contain 3 million compromised cards with both track 1 and track 2 data. They purportedly came from 35 US states and “some” countries across Europe and Asia.”

This BLAZINGSUN breach contains 3 million compromised payment records that are available for a median price of $17 per card.

The experts worked with several partner financial institutions who independently confirmed the authenticity of the stolen data.

According to Gemini, the hackers obtained the card details after compromised the in-store Point-of-Sale (POS) system used at Dickey’s Barbecue Pit restaurants.

Crooks compromised 156 of Dickey’s 469 locations across 30 states, most of them in California and Arizona.

Dickey’s locations are marked by the blue restaurant icon while the locations confirmed to be compromised are marked in red.

The compromise took place between July 2019 and August 2020. Gemini reported that the root cause of the security breach was the use of the outdated magstripe method for payment transactions, which exposed car holders to PoS malware attacks.

The company published an official statement that confirmed that it has immediately started the incident response procedure.

“We received a report indicating that a payment card security incident may have occurred. We are taking this incident very seriously and immediately initiated our response protocol and an investigation is underway. We are currently focused on determining the locations affected and time frames involved.” reads the statement provided by the company. “We are utilizing the experience of third parties who have helped other restaurants address similar issues and also working with the FBI and payment card networks. We understand that payment card network rules generally provide that individuals who timely report unauthorized charges to the bank that issued their card are not responsible for those charges.” 

The payment card records are mostly for cards using outdated magstripe technologies and are being sold for a median price of $17 per card.

“Based on previous Joker’s Stash major breaches, the records from Dickey’s will likely continue to be added to this marketplace over several months.”concludes the post.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Dickey’s Barbecue Pit)