Sources: Target Investigating Data Breach

I just checked an account recently used at Target, and it had about $800 in fraudulent charges made in the last couple days.

Called the bank, cancelled the card. This is becoming almost routine, the third breach of my personal accounts in two years.

I wonder why learning algorithms aren't preventing more fraud. My card has a very clear pattern of use -- locations, merchants, etc. The fraudulent charges are invariably in distant cities, at merchants I've never patronized.

Yet occasionally the bank will take the initiative and shut off an account for suspected fraud -- for charges made within 2 miles of my home, and merchants I've done business with for years, etc.

With petabytes of transaction and fraud data, why can't they build more intelligent fraud detection?

"It’s not clear how many cards thieves may have stolen in the breach. But the sources I spoke with from two major card issuers said they have so far been notified by one of the credit card associations regarding more than one million of cards total from both issuers that were thought to have been compromised in the breach."

Well crap.

This is the third time Target has been the target of hacking in the last couple of years, after they previously had their POS systems hacked in 2009:

http://storefrontbacktalk.com/securityfraud/j-c-penney-targe...

And their customers account info leaked last year:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/04/huge_emai...

Secret Service is now investigating: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/secret-service-inves...

This could turn out to be a big deal, especially if debit cards and PINs were compromised.

This deserves a bit of context, as many U.S. and Canadian members may either be affected or have family and friends who may be:

Nationwide retail giant Target is investigating a data breach potentially involving millions of customer credit and debit card records, multiple reliable sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The sources said the breach appears to have begun on or around Black Friday 2013 — by far the busiest shopping day the year.

According to sources at two different top 10 credit card issuers, the breach extends to nearly all Target locations nationwide, and involves the theft of data stored on the magnetic stripe of cards used at the stores...

Can someone just make some data visualization of corporations getting hacked and to what extent, e.g what kind of data was leaked - private messages, health info, credit card, passwords, etc. Methods used for infiltration should be listed too. Getting tired of reading 5 articles a day on how huge site X got hacked. It would be good to just be able to look at a graph and see some peaks once in a while, click on them for detailed info about the breach. Such a site would be useful for backing up arguments.