Bangalore: It is raining hackers! According to Reuters, it is not just Target and Neiman Marcus who have fallen prey to hackers during the holidays but there may be many other retailers too. Major networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even one of the most popular messaging application SnapChat was not spared.

Target mentioned that hackers had made away with 70 million of its customers’ names, mailing address, email address, payment card details, and telephone numbers and the affected customers are yet to be notified. The attack on the U.S. retailers Point of Sales devices seems to have been launched by hackers in Eastern Europe. However, the company has not revealed how the Point of Sales machines were breached.

” What we do know is that there was malware installed on our point of sale registers. That much we have established. We have removed that malware so that we could provide a safe and secure shopping environment,” said Gregg Steinhafel, CEO, Target, in an interview to CNBC. He added that the company is still investigating on the issue.

Neiman Marcus, another high-end store, corroborated that its customer database too had been attacked, which was brought to their notice by its credit card processor; however, the company did not reveal how many customers were affected. For the timing and resemblance in the hacking methods, there is speculation that the same hackers may be responsible for the recent attacks on major retail U.S stores. 

Reuters reported that RAM scrapers, the sophisticated class of malware which bypasses encryption methods and steals the payment card data from POS devices, was used in the hacking attacks.

The recent breaches of security and pilferation of payment card databases has also questioned the affected companies’ compliance with the Payment Card Industry data security standards (PCI DSS).