National Amusements, the movie theater chain and corporate parent of media giants Paramount and CBS, confirmed that it experienced a data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of tens of thousands of people.
The private media conglomerate said in a legally required filing with the Maine attorney general that hackers stole personal information from 82,128 people during a data breach in December 2022.
Details of the December 2022 breach did not come to light until a year later, after the company began notifying those affected last week.
According to the Maine notice, the company discovered the breach months later, in August 2023, but did not say what specific personal information was taken. The data breach notice filed with Maine said the hackers also stole financial information, such as bank account numbers or credit card numbers in combination with associated security codes, passwords or secrets.
The stolen data may be related to the company's employees, since the company's head of human resources submitted the data breach notification letter.
But the media giant has said little else about the breach, or whether the personal information of its clients or users is also affected. It's unclear what type of cyberattack the company experienced, or whether it received a ransom demand or subsequently paid the hackers.
Rachel Lulay, a spokeswoman for National Amusements, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Spokespeople for CBS and Paramount also had no comment.
National Amusements owns more than 1,500 theaters across the United States, but the company is best known for its majority stake in Paramount and CBS following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019.
Paramount revealed a separate security incident in August, according to a presentation to the attorney general of Massachusetts, in which hackers obtained personal information from an unspecified number of customers. The hackers stole names and birthdates of Paramount customers, as well as Social Security numbers or other government-issued identification numbers, according to the notice.
Disclosure: Zack Whittaker previously worked at CBS before August 2018.
