Sally Beauty says that a security breach discovered on March 5 affected fewer than 25,000 credit and debit card accounts.
The seller of beauty supplies is pursuing its investigation with a forensics firm. It is also working with the U.S. Secret Service on their preliminary investigation into the matter.
Sally Beauty Holdings Inc., which is based in Denton, Texas, said Monday that it will provide more information on its website in coming days, including notification of affected consumers and others.
A spate of major data breaches in recent months has raised awareness about the vulnerability of cards used in the U.S.
Recent intrusions include those at Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus. The Target breach compromised 40 million credit and debit cards and personal information of up to 70 million customers. At Neiman Marcus, its breach may have compromised 1.1 million debit and credit cards.
- Target: Data Breach Could Be Even Worse Than We Know
- 1.1M Cards Vulnerable During Neiman Marcus Breach
Nikhil Moro, a University of North Texas Journalism professor, is currently studying private data breaches like these as well as larger scale one's like recent breaches into the NSA. Moro feels the bigger situation may not be the hackers who are accessing the data, but the actual scale of the data held by companies and the laws regarding how it is handled.
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"The law has, it seems, not kept up with the potential for the abuse of the enormous amount of data that corporations routinely collect as part of doing business,” said Moro.
He's even concerned that there may be other data breaches occurring that simply aren't being reported to the government or public due to a lack of oversight.
"We really should expect such incidents to go up and the one way to counter it, the best way in fact, would be to strengthen the legal framework," he said.
Security experts have been long pushed for increased consumer protection through so-called EMV enabled credit and debit cards, which are already common in Europe. Most cards in the U.S. still feature magnetic strips.
Earlier this month Visa and MasterCard, which seek broader acceptance of EMV technology from retailers and ATMs, said that they are creating a group intended to help the retail and banking industries come together on more-secure credit card payments. Visa and MasterCard, which run the networks that carry the payments, said the group's initial focus will be on chips embedded in newer credit cards that make them more secure.
NBC 5's Brian Scott contributed to this report.
