Happy Holidays becomes ‘Happy Data Breaches’

by: Jim Nussle and Camden R. Fine

Hackers and cyber-criminals keep hitting the repeat button on data breaches: Every week, it seems there is a new headline of yet another violation that has affected one of our nation’s retailers. It’s time for retailers to come to the table to put a stop to the excessive number of data breaches and protect American consumers.

The year got underway with the immediate aftermath of the Target breach, which resulted in the violation of at least 40 million records of credit and debit card sales. The worst offense happened this fall with the Home Depot breach, whose 56 million affected consumer records make it the biggest retail breach in history.

In between those behemoth breaches, we saw nearly weekly additional occurrences at Supervalu, Jimmy John’s, Neiman Marcus, P.F. Chang’s, Michaels, Staples, Dairy Queen—the list goes on and on. Sadly, no end is in sight: More than 500 data security breaches have occurred in 2014 so far, exposing more than 75 million data records. Between now and year’s end, and particularly with the holiday shopping period in full swing, our nation’s retailers are likely vulnerable to additional breaches.

What is particularly frustrating to us, as the leaders of national trade groups representing credit unions and community banks, is that little attention is given to strengthening the weakest points where these violations occur—U.S. retailers—and thereby reducing these costly breaches and their effect on consumers.

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