Vera Bradley Investigating Data Breach

Vera Bradley has reported that payment cards used at its retail stores were potentially hacked over a two-month period this summer. A spokeswoman for the company said that the card transactions occurred between July 25 and Sept. 23, and that online transactions weren’t affected by this breach. Vera Bradley then launched an investigation that showed hackers had installed a program in the company's payment processing system that tracked customer data contained in the magnetic strips of payment cards.

Total Retail’s Take: With the holiday season quickly approaching, this is terrible timing for Vera Bradley to have to report a data breach (not that there's ever a good time). Although the company said the breach has been fixed, consumers may now think twice about shopping at a Vera Bradley store for gifts this holiday season. We'll see what changes Vera Bradley makes to ensure this doesn’t happen again, as well as how it handles the fallout from consumers.