Target sure is living up to its name. The news yesterday that the megastore’s point-of-sale systems had been compromised and as many as 40 million cards exposed to possible fraud came at a bad time for the store and the economy as a whole. The weeks leading up to Christmas are critical for retailers, and this news surely gave shoppers pause as they contemplated pulling out their plastic for another purchase. It’s a black eye for Target, in particular, and repercussions may be felt for some time to come. The 40 million cards can be sold on the internet and lie dormant for many months before fraud is attempted. Put simply, it sucks for the customer and his bank. But it’s worth putting the data breach in historical perspective. “It’s one of the large one, but it’s not the largest by any means,” said Joram Borenstein, vice president of financial crime, risk and compliance firm NICE Actimize. “The TJ Maxx incident [in 2007] affected 47 or 48 million cards, and the Sony PlayStation incident in 2011 exposed as many as 100 million cards.” The breach got some people talking about EMV (Europay, Mastercard & Visa), the card standard widely used [...]
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