"The single most important credit card hack."

I caught part of an episode of Marketplace Money on NPR in the car today. They were talking about the recent credit card information leak that happened at Target, calling it the single most important credit card hack. I had heard that Target customers recently had personal information stolen, but there were a few things mentioned in the radio show that were new to me and really put it into perspective.

First of all, a reported 1 in 5 U.S. citizens have had their information compromised due to the hack. That's staggering, and definitely puts into perspective (among other things) how massive this issue really is. It makes their "...most important..." claim seem a lot less like hyperbole.

Another thing, I guess it wasn't just Target, but Target's parent company who was hacked. This means that not only Target shoppers, but customers elsewhere were affected as well. At first Target was pretty tight-lipped, avoiding making a statement but have recently come around and have been offering free credit monitoring as well as personally emailing each affected customer. This is all great, but Marketplace Money brought up a good point: customers are now expecting email from Target, and may be more susceptible to phishing attacks. Truly insult to injury.

I reckon some people would see an email from Target and their spider senses would start tingling, due to the recent hack. Unfortunately, I imagine they wouldn't be the majority. Another example of information security (or lack thereof) affecting a large number of people. So what's the lesson here? It's not as if those shoppers could have (or even reasonably SHOULD have) mistrusted Target, and I don't think we should fear some type of Orwellian state, but I do think we ought to be more aware as a society of the information we offer freely whether on the web / site registrations, via email, or even the stores we shop in.