Costco, Sam's Club, others halt photo sites over possible breach

TORONTO, July 20 (Reuters) - Half a dozen online photoprinting stores based in the United States, UK and Canada,including those of Costco Wholesale Corp and Sam's Club, became in recent days the latest retailers to face apossible data breach at PNI Digital Media, which manages and/orhosts photo services sites.

Last week CVS Health Corp disabled its CVSphoto.comsite, and the week before Walmart Canada's walmartphotocentre.ca took a similar action after it wasinformed that customer credit card data had been potentiallycompromised.

Other photo printing sites that might have been recentlyaffected included Rite Aid Corp, Sam's Club and Britishsupermarket chain Tesco's.

"We take the protection of information very seriously. PNIis investigating a potential credit card data issue, and outsidesecurity experts are assisting in the investigation," said KirkSaville, vice president, global communications at Staples Inc, which bought Vancouver-based PNI last year.

Some websites said they had been advised by PNI of apotential breach, while others said they acted because of recentreports.

Costco Canada and Rite Aid noted that PNI has limited accessto customer information since it does not process credit cards,but the photo service sites were temporarily taken down as aprecaution.

CVS and Walmart Canada asked customers to monitor theircredit card transactions closely for unauthorized charges.

Tesco's page simply said it was it was unavailable forroutine maintenance.

The retailers' main websites and other services were notaffected by the potential breach. (Reporting by Solarina Ho; Additional reporting by Nayan Das;Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Tesco