Why do I get the feeling that some of the "privacy and security experts" who tell us that these breaches are rare, over publicized and unimportant are like the anti-global warming people who know it's a lie but are paid handsomely to create uncertainty and doubt? I guess there's nothing to see here, in their opinion.
TJX Cos. said today it discovered the theft of credit-card and debit card information from its systems, a breach that could affect a broad swath of customers of TJ Maxx, Marshalls and other stores.
The Framingham retailer, which has 2,500 outlets, said it doesn't know how much data was compromised by the break-in, though one banking official said potentially millions of cardholders could be affected.
Data breaches are becoming an increasing threat to consumers and payments systems that handle millions of transactions per day. TJX's case is unusual in that many cases tracked by privacy advocates involve data that was inadvertently lost or left unshielded. In contrast, TJX said it had discovered in the middle of December that it "suffered an unauthorized intrusion'' into the parts of its computer system that process and store details of customer purchases.
