Be Careful Beating Up Target (Part 1)

Craig Carpenter of AccessData writes:

A flurry of stories surfaced this week, including those in Bloomberg BusinessWeek and InformationWeek, highlighting signals of compromise that Target apparently “missed” or even “ignored”, resulting in the theft of 40 million credit card accounts. Clearly the Target breach was serious and wide-ranging, as it affected a large number of customers and even hit Target’s fourth quarter revenue and earnings.

But before we get carried away with all that Target could or should have done to prevent their breach, however, we should examine all that was done – and take a closer look at just how different Target’s preparation and response were to almost any other Global 1000 firm. What we’ll find is that Target was actually better prepared than the vast majority of their peers across all industries, leading to the clear conclusion that the problem lies not with Target, but with the current state of threat intelligence and IR (incident response).