National Amusements, the movie chain and corporate parent of media giant Paramount and CBS, has confirmed it suffered a data breach in which hackers stole the personal information of tens of thousands of people.
The private media group said in a legally required filing with the Maine attorney general that hackers stole personal information of 82,128 people during a data breach in December 2022.
Details of the December 2022 breach came to light just over a year later, after the company began notifying those affected last week.
According to Maine’s notice, the company discovered the breach months later, in August 2023, but did not say what specific personal information was taken. The data breach notification filed in Maine said the hackers also stole financial information, such as bank account numbers or credit card numbers along with associated security codes, passwords or secrets.
The stolen data may relate to company employees, as the data breach notification letter was submitted by the company’s head of human resources.
However, the media giant has not said much else about the breach or whether the personal information of its customers or users is also affected. It’s unclear what kind of cyberattack the company experienced, or whether the company received a ransom demand — or subsequently paid the hackers.
National Amusements will not comment beyond its data breach notification. When asked about the incident, Molly Morse, a Kekst CNC partner representing National Amusements, said the company declined to comment further.
Representatives for CBS and Paramount had no comment.
National Amusements owns more than 1,500 movie theaters across the United States, but the company is best known for its controlling stake in Paramount and CBS following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019.
Paramount disclosed a separate security incident in August, according to a filing with the Massachusetts attorney general, in which hackers took the personal information of an unspecified number of customers. The hackers stole Paramount’s customer names and dates of birth, as well as Social Security numbers or other government-issued identification numbers, according to the notice.
Disclosure: Zack Whittaker was previously employed by CBS prior to August 2018. Updated with an acknowledgment of the incident by a representative of National Amusements
