National Amusements, the holding company that controls Paramount Global and CBS and operates the Showcase Cinemas chain, disclosed in late December 2023 that it had been hacked a year earlier. The disclosure came through a data breach notification filed with the Maine attorney general.
The filing said 82,128 people were affected. Attackers reached the company's network in December 2022, and the exposed records included names together with financial information such as bank account numbers or credit and debit card numbers combined with security codes, access codes, passwords or PINs.
Accounts of the timeline differ. SecurityWeek reported that National Amusements detected the intrusion in December 2022 and completed its investigation in August 2023. TechCrunch described the breach as having been discovered in August 2023. Either way, roughly a year passed between the incident and the notification letters, which went out in late December 2023.
National Amusements said it secured its network, engaged cybersecurity specialists and had no indication that identity theft or fraud had resulted. It offered affected individuals credit monitoring, fraud consultation and identity theft restoration services. The notification was submitted by the company's head of human resources, which TechCrunch noted suggests the affected records were largely employee data. The company declined to comment further, and CBS and Paramount did not comment.