Radiant Systems sued over hacked accounts

By Péralte C. Paul

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A group of Louisiana restaurant owners may proceed as a group in a lawsuit against the Georgia-based maker of a credit card payments system they say allowed hackers to steal customer account numbers.

The seven restaurateurs, who filed suit in a Louisiana state court in March, are suing Radiant Systems of Alpharetta and Computer World, a Louisiana retailer that sold Radiant’s payment processing program called “Aloha.”

The suit alleges the Aloha program illegally stored all the magnetic stripe information after the card was swiped. Storage of card information violates the security standards with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.

Card issuers are vigilant because fraud costs them $500 million a year and those costs are passed onto consumers. The Louisiana breaches were discovered after restaurant customers began reporting unauthorized charges.

Radiant, facing a second suit in Louisiana with similar claims, says the charges are baseless, and such breaches are not uncommon in the restaurant industry.

“It is Radiant’s policy not to comment on the details of pending litigation,” said Paul Langenbahn, president of Radiant’s hospitality division. “What we can say is that Radiant takes data security very seriously and that our products are among the most secure in the industry. We believe the allegations against Radiant are without merit, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves.”

Computer World is named in the suit because its technicians installed a remote-access program on the Aloha system that allowed them to access the hardware and software off-site and fix any technical problems. That remote-access program was vulnerable to attack because the technicians used the same passwords and log-ins for all the restaurants.

Neither Computer World nor its attorney returned telephone calls seeking comment.