In a second security breach within two years, the world’s largest retailer of professional beauty supplies, Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc, confirmed that there had been suspicious activity pertaining to payment cards at some of its US locations.

Sally Beauty had a vast chain of customers and retailers. Currently, its products are available at 4,900 stores, which include 200 franchised units, in the US, UK, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Peru, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ireland, Spain and Germany.

On Thursday, May 14, the company saw its shares plunge by almost five percent, as soon as news of its security being compromised spread. The Denton, Texas-based company, reported fraudulent activity concerning debit and credit cards. However, it pacified the customers by stating that the burden to make good the loss, would not be put on the customers.

The company suffered a similar security breach in March 2014, when a security lapse affected thousands of its customers who had made purchases at the company’s stores, using debit and credit cards. As compensation, the company had offered to its customers a full year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, for free.

The present slip-up comes amidst other serious data breaches maiming the developing e-commerce marketplace. A notable example is of Target Corp., wherein about 40 million debit and credit cards were tampered with. Such privacy intrusions call for enhanced data protection, not only for corporate, but also for financial institutions, they being the card issuers.

Sally Beauty has kept mum with respect to the details of the breach, as the case is sub judice and investigations are on. However, to ease customer anxiety, it has put in place a customer service hotline at (866) 234-9442 and an email at customerserviceinquiry@sallybeauty.com, as an additional enquiry channel.