Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones has a great piece about the Target data breach. As I’m reading this I kept thinking about the Obamacare website and how everyone kept saying government can’t do anything right. Read this article, and you’ll never complain about Obamacare again. Some highlights…
Over the last decade, most countries have moved toward using credit cards that carry information on embeddable microchips rather than magnetic strips. The additional encryption on so-called smart cards has made the kind of brazen data thefts suffered by Target almost impossible to pull off in most other countries.
Because the U.S. is one of the few places yet to widely deploy such technology, the nation has increasingly become the focus of hackers seeking to steal such information. The stolen data can easily be turned into phony credit cards that are sold on black markets around the world.