Here's a link to USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/05/targ...
In the months since [the hack was found], Target adopted a faster timeline for switching to more secure chip-based credit and debit cards, and the payment terminals that accept them. As part of the $100 million effort, Target announced last week that it all of its store-branded cards would be reissued as MasterCard chip-and-pin cards in 2015.
This will only help customers who have such cards, which is... visitors from Europe? Anyone else? A more valuable feature for the new terminals would be code signing for firmware updates.
Travelling to Europe without such cards is extremely painful.
"all of its store-branded cards would be reissued as MasterCard chip-and-pin cards"
There was no advertising of this fact, but I noticed the chip, it's visible, as they generally are.
This led me to try googling to figure out what was going on... I'm still a bit confused. It looks like most major US banks are going to be issuing cards with chips in 2014-2015... but oddly, for the person familiar with these from Europe, I'm not sure there are any plans to actually start using PIN's. They are going to continue with signature-based authentication... but maybe the PoS devices are going to be doing something with the chip, even though not requiring a PIN? Got me, I'm still confused.
I had a chip and pin card in 2007 and alot of merchants have had card readers capable of using them since mid 2005.