Originally Posted by
Sevenfeet
It's amazing what it will take in order to get a company to take data security serious. Sadly, it's often hacks like this. This whole episode is costing Target millions upon millions. Not to mention the loss of trust of customers. Yes, upgrading their entire retail point-of-sale operation is expensive and time consuming. But what is worse is stuff like this
Anyone in retail right now who isn't in a mad dash to upgrade to chip cards is whistling past the proverbial graveyard. In the meantime, I have a wallet full of EMV chip credit cards and haven't been in a store that authenticates them yet. I'd say unbelievable, but I work in IT.
Well, that's only the retail side. Then there's the bank side.
Both of them say "oh noes it's gonna cost us more money to do this, waaah, waaah, mommieeeee" until it's too late and the damage has been done.
I've been saying for years, there's the financial aspect and there's the bad public relations disaster. The latter is the one that's more damaging on the long term than chasing after few cents and dollars.
I mean really, is it worth taking a risk of bad publicity and tanking your company's reputation just because you don't want to spend
$150-$300 in one time cost for an EMV card reader; something that has to be replaced sooner or later anyway?