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If you read how that breach happened
A report from HudsonRock published on October 23 suggested that the breach may have originated from an information stealer malware infection that stole credentials for a data unification service used by Hot Topic
From the HudsonRock article:
researchers discovered an employee who was recently infected by an Infostealer on September 12th, 2024
With over 240 credentials found on the machine, many of which are corporate, researchers determined that this person is employed at a company called “Robling”, whose description is “Helping retailers unite data across silos”.
To me that reads as an employee from a third party processor was infected with an info stealer, and that was used to get info from Hot Topic
The scariest part to me was that apparently the credit cards were very weakly encrypted.