The California Department of Motor Vehicles may have suffered a credit card data breach involving online transactions for the agency's services, a security blogger said Saturday.
According to blogger Brian Krebs, banks in California and elsewhere were alerted by MasterCard about compromised cards that had all been used for online transactions at the California DMV.
Krebs, who was the first to report the breach of Target customers' credit card data last year, said it remained unclear how many card numbers may have been stolen this time.
A spokesman for the agency, Armado Botello, said the department had no immediate comment, but said the agency would release a statement later Saturday.
MasterCard, meanwhile, is “aware of and investigating” reports of a potential breech, company spokesman Seth Eisen told the Los Angeles Times.
The breach only involved online transactions, and not those made at California DMV physical locations, according to Krebs' report.
Last year, Minneapolis-based Target Corp. said 40 million credit and debit card accounts had been affected by a data breach that happened between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, just as the holiday shopping season was getting into gear.
Hackers stole personal information — including names, phone numbers as well as email and mailing addresses — from as many as 70 million customers as part of that hack.