Pierluigi Paganini May 24, 2017

Target, the US retail giant, has entered a settlement with the US Attorneys General and it has agreed to pay $18.5 million over the 2013 data breach.

Target, the US retail giant, has entered a settlement with the Attorneys General of 47 states and it has agreed to pay $18.5 million over the data breach suffered in 2013.

Nearly 40 Million credit and debit card accounts belonging to Target customers have been stolen during the traditional holiday shopping season in 2013.

The company intends to compensate the costs incurred by its customers and to compensate for the damage it has caused to the consumers.

The company will pay the overall amount of money to all the Attorneys General involved in the investigations, $1.2 million will be paid to the Illinois Attorneys General and roughly $1 million to the Connecticut that lead the legal action against the company.

According to the settlement, Target accepted to implement an information security program to protect its customer.

“TARGET shall, within one hundred and eighty ( 180) days after the Effective Date of this Assurance, develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive information security program (” Information Security Program”) that is reasonably designed to protect the security, integrity, and confidentiality of Personal Information it collects or obtains from Consumers.” reads the settlement.

The Information Security Program shall cover administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to:

• The size and complexity of TARGET’ s operations;
• The nature and scope of TARGET’ s activities;
• The sensitivity of the Personal Information that TARGET maintains.

The company will adopt further measures to protect its customers, including network segmentation, access control, and management, file integrity monitoring, whitelisting, logging, change control, and the adoption of payment card security technologies.

The settlement established that the cyber security of the company’s systems must be assessed by a third-party, at the same time the company has to audit any vendor or subcontractor it works with. Let’s remind that the hackers that broke into the company payment systems used as entry point an HVAC contractor.

Target admitted last year that the data breach had cost it $290 million, the company paid $67 million to Visa card issuers, $19 million to MasterCard card issuers, over $20 million to banks and credit unions, and $10 million to the affected consumers.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – data breach, cybercrime)

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