logical.order.of.chaos

This article is very scary.  For this to happen to a large company like TJX is bad.  But what is really interesting is that this wasn’t an e-tailer.  This was a large chain store that had their brick and mortor security breeched apparently over the Internet.  It seems today no data is safe. 

It did take them about 8 months just to discover this breech.  The newer article claims they have actually been breeched ‘period of more than 18 months by an unknown number of intruders’.  In that time who knows how far the data has been spread, and how many false charges have appeared on credit cards. 

The original story says that they were keeping ’mag stripe,’ or ’Track 2′ information.  This is specifically prohibited by the PCI-DSS standard.  But the newer article claims that most of this data was obscured  or removed.

I see this as the next big regulatory movement in our industry.  Growing up with my Father being in the seafood business I have seen regulations slowly come online for food quality standards.  I think this is going to be much swifter, and the credit card companies will eventually lose the control over PCI-DSS to the government.  It is probably a good idea based on what we are seeing happening.   It is unfortunate that it has to come to this.

Filed under: News, Security