Ho,Ho, Ho, data theft we go.  It wasn't just gullible shoppers were in a frenzy on Black Friday.  Seems hackers love the marketing hyped retail bonanza as well.  Target was hacked and a whopping 40 million credit and debit cards were ripped off from November 27th to December 19th.  The speed of the massive theft is unprecedented in cyber-crime history.  Target is the second largest generalized merchandise retailer in America.  This is huge.

The irony is extreme.  Target just became a target for data theft.  The data stolen is track data and this is the information on the magnetic strip of the card.  Swipe your card in a Target magnetic card reader to make your purchase, it is 100% probable your information was stolen.  This is pretty bad.  Thieves got the customer name, card number, expiration date and even that three digit number on the back, often used for security.

It is not clear if the hackers obtained the 4 digit pin used with debit cards and are doing a run on bank accounts.  There are many ways hackers can access corporate servers to capture data.  Something this large implies Target had a big wide gaping security hole somewhere.  Yet initial reports are saying this attack was unique.  It was distributed, coordinated theft.  Instead of attacking a centralized server, the thieves hacked into each individual Target store.  Although the cyber-crime technique is not confirmed, it is believes the actual credit and debt card readers had malicious software programmed right into them.  Target has 1,797 stores in the United States, each one having at least 20 card readers.  If the software was on the card readers, this might imply not just Target is vulnerable to such an attack.

Target did not even find the breach.  Visa and Mastercard did when massive fraudulent purchases started piling up, all traced back to accounts who made a physical purchase at a Target store.  Kind of amazing considering Target has spent millions to track your data and can even tell if you are pregnant before you do.  Something this systemic is possibly in every Target store in America making it much more difficult to remove and now 40 million Target customers are scrambling to kill accounts, obtain credits and new cards with only days until Christmas.  What a gift, to other retailers that is.

Update:  It seems hackers did indeed obtained the 4 digit PINs to accessible people's bank accounts.  It is unclear if the encryption has be cracked and if so this would mean thieves would have access to people's bank accounts.