Slashdot Mirror

jfruh (300774) writes "U.S. retailers must accept chip-and-pin charge cards by the end of 2015 or become liable for fraudulent purchases made with chip cards. Target, still smarting from its recent embarrassing security breach, is moving to get ahead of that trend. The company will be installing chip-and-pin terminals in all its stores, and will also be issuing chip-and-pin versions of its own branded cards, which account for about 20 percent of Target sales. Will this move by a huge retailer push the U.S. into parity with the rest of the world?"

Wayne Rash has covered IT as a reporter and editor for over 35 years. NPR, Fox Business News, and NBC all call on him as a technology expert. A few weeks ago he had an article on eWeek titled How Target's Credit Card Security Breach Could Have Been Avoided. In this video, Wayne tells how you (or your business) can avoid being targeted by miscreants out to steal credit card data. It turns out that the security measures he advocates for businesses are common in other parts of the world but haven't hit the United States quite yet. But don't despair. There are things you can do right now, as an individual, to limit your potential losses from card number thefts. Still, the long-term fixes to the security vulnerability that bit Target need to be made by merchants and card issuers, some of whom are already transitioning to cards and card readers that use EMV chips, and some of whom aren't quite there yet -- but might speed up their efforts after seeing what happened to Target.

New submitter danlip writes "Target has confirmed that encrypted PIN data was taken during its recent credit card breach. Target doesn't think they can be unencrypted by whoever may have taken them, because the key was never on the breached system. The article has no details on exactly how the PINs were encrypted, but it doesn't seem like it would be hard to brute force them." Another article at Time takes Target to task for its PR doublespeak about the breach.

BRock97 asks: "There is no better activity which sheds light on 'Geek/Non-Geek' interaction than Christmas shopping. As I try and browse Target's online store looking for the perfect gift, I can't help be gravitate back to ThinkGeek in hopes I will find something that the receiver of the gift will find useful AND also remind them of the person who gave it. I was curious as to what other /.'ers were planning on getting their friends and loved ones (parents/grandparents) who live the 'non-geek' lifestyle." We've already told Santa what we'd like for Christmas, now what about the non-geeks in our lives?

Quixote asks: "''Black Friday' is about over now. Though I wasn't among the faithful who queued up to get into the stores, I could see massive traffic jams in the local Best Buy, Target, etc. on my drive in to work. But it looks like the online offerings of some of the retailers are also pretty much slashdotted (I'm downloading a 500KB rebate form from CompUSA rebate center at the blazing speed of 800bytes/sec as I submit this story). So, how many of you avoided the long checkout lines and used the 'net instead? What are your experiences? What 'killer' deals did you get online, that you wouldn't have gotten in the store? And what are your thoughts on this whole phenomenon: why shouldn't the stores just get rid of this 'lets open the store at an unearthly hour' practice, and just move all of the 'Black Friday' sales online?"