Hannaford shores up cyber defenses after breach
Photo / Renee Cordes
Eight months after a cybersecurity breach at Hannaford Supermarkets, the company's Dutch owner said it is notifying affected individuals whose contact information was identified.
Eight months after a data breach at Hannaford, the European owner of the Scarborough-based grocery chain is taking measures to notify the 95,000-plus affected Maine residents and prevent future violations.
“The company understands the importance of cybersecurity and is committed to protecting the information of its customers, associates and vendor partners,” a spokesperson for Ahold Delhaize, Hannaford's parent company, said in an emailed response to a query from Mainebiz.
Without specifying what measures it is putting in place, the company added that it “continues to take actions to further protect its systems.”
Ahold Delhaize, headquartered in the Netherlands, was formed from the 2016 cross-border merger of Belgium-based Delhaize with its larger Dutch peer. Delhaize had acquired Hannaford in 2000.
More on the breach
Hannaford, which owns 68 supermarkets in Maine, detected a cybersecurity issue last November involving unauthorized access to some of its internal U.S. business systems.
Information with the Maine Attorney General’s office shows that 95,463 Maine residents were among the more than 2.2 million people affected by the breach, which happened Nov. 5 and 6.
The company worked with external cybersecurity experts to launch an immediate investigation, which found out that an unauthorized third party obtained certain files from one of its internal U.S. repositories.
Based on that review, Ahold Delhaize said last week that the files that may have been affected contained personal information including Social Security numbers and bank accounts as well as health and employment-related data.
On Monday, the company said that it is directly notifying affected individuals whose contact information was identified to make them aware of the matter and arranged to offer two years of complimentary credit monitoring and identify protection services.
Hannaford is ranked as Maine's second-largest employer after MaineHealth in the 2025 Mainebiz Book of Lists. Rankings are based on average monthly employment in the second quarter of 2024.
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