Tagged: Big Data

Bull’s Eye

It’s cold so I’m putting on my tin-foil hat.

Last week, we learned that hackers stole personal information from 70 million to 110 million of Target’s customers. This was much higher than the inital report of 40 million customers. That number represents at least “a third of all American adults.”

Based on hearing of this security breach back in December, I thought it was as if someone had tapped into Target’s credit card processing operation and was sniffing that data as people shopped from Black Friday to December 19, when news of the breach broke. But then I remembered that Target collects and processes an extraordinary amount of data. It probably knows as much about their customers as any other company could.

If there were an enticing company to, ahem, target with a breach of its customer data, it makes sense that it would be Target.