The Wendy’s chain of fast food restaurants recently experienced a significant data breach. Hackers broke into the company’s computer system and stole customer payment card data from cards used at some of the 6,000 Wendy’s locations worldwide. The company has not disclosed how many locations were affected but the breach lasted from October 22, 2015 to March 10th, 2016. 

Now the fast food chain is being sued by the banks whose customers were affected by the breach. As stated in the class-action lawsuit, the breach seeks to recuperate the damages that resulted from the breach, as the banks were “forced to cancel and reissue payment cards, change or close accounts, notify customers that their cards were compromised,” as well as the costs of investigating fraudulent activity, refunding fraudulent charges, increasing fraud monitoring on impacted accounts, and other steps which had to be taken in order to protect their business interests and customers.

Lawsuits resulting from data breaches are becoming increasingly common. Both Target and Home Depot have faced legal action in the past few years as a result of their respective data breaches. Another part of the lawsuit accuses Wendy’s of failing to comply with industry standards with regards to protecting payment card and customer data and refusing "to take steps to adequately protect its computer systems from intrusion.” The lawsuit alleges that this failure to adequately protect its computer systems lead to the lengthy data breach. 

The Target data breach affecting customer payment information cost the company approximately $252 million whereas a data breach at Home Depot was expected to cost the retailer up to a billion dollars as a result of multiple lawsuits. As reported on Brian Krebs’ blog, Dan Berger, CEO of the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, said “many credit unions saw a huge increase in debit card fraud in a few weeks before the Wendy’s breach became public.” He also reported that “the amounts hitting compromised debit accounts [are] much higher than what they were hit with after Home Deport or Target.”