Wichita banks seeing some effect from Home Depot data breach

Officials from some of Wichita’s largest banks said Wednesday that they are seeing the effects of data breaches at national retailers, including Home Depot.

Last week, Atlanta-based Home Depot estimated that 56 million credit and debit cards were breached in a theft of its data between April and September at stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Officials at Intrust Bank and Emprise Bank said their information shows that some of their customers’ cards could have been caught up in the most recent disclosed breaches.

“Right now we’re just telling people to be watching their accounts (for unusual activity),” said Emprise spokesman Paul Owens. “We’ve re-issued a very small amount of debit cards. We haven’t done a mass re-issue.”

At Intrust, the city’s largest bank, Tom Morrison said the bank plans to begin issuing new credit and debit cards to some customers.

He said that decision was made based on Intrust’s own evaluation of Intrust debit and credit cards used at Home Depot during the period of the data breaches as well as information sent to it by the credit and debit card companies Visa and Mastercard.

“At this point, we’re going to begin the re-issue process pretty quickly,” said Morrison, Intrust’s division director of operations and technology.

He said it will likely be some time before Intrust knows exactly how many customer cards have been affected.

He would not specify how many cards the bank plans to re-issue now.

“Our initial analysis says this looks to be a little larger than the Target breach,” Morrison said. “Until we get the final lists from Visa and Mastercard, we won’t know for sure.”

Late last year, Target announced that about 40 million of its customers’ debit and credit cards might have been affected by a data breach that occurred at its stores between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15.

Contributing: Associated Press

This story was originally published September 24, 2014 at 4:25 PM with the headline "Wichita banks seeing some effect from Home Depot data breach."