As one of the millions of people paying for holiday gifts with a credit card or debit card at Target, I thought the only danger taking place was the more-than-budgeted money leaving my banking account. As headlines in newspaper and lead stories on nightly newscasts attest though, there was more to it than that.

Releasing perhaps its most disappointing statement in the company’s more than 50 year history, Target acknowledged hackers illegally accessed the debit and credit card information of some 40 million individuals making purchases in its stores.

While hackers have infiltrated other retailers such as TJ Maxx (reportedly costing that discount merchant about $256 million) in recent years, the attack on Target began two days before the year’s busiest shopping day – Black Friday. Astonishingly enough, the breach wasn’t discovered until nearly three weeks had elapsed, on Dec. 15. Considering the timing – when the best and brightest IT personnel should have been on full alert – the red bull’s-eye logo on the retailer’s cute bull terrier mascot might as well have been black and blue.

Comprised hard drives are often inviting targets for hackers, and it is in the best interest of any business to safeguard this crucial information gateway as vigilantly as possible. Target’s security lapse represents a cautionary tale for any business – the importance of protecting one’s data. Encrypting such vital information may have saved Target from the bruising news coverage and perhaps most important, the possible loss of consumer confidence.

Having developed a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) – which meets the U.S. Department of Defense’s rigid security requirements – for its award-winning line of e-STUDIO multifunction products (MFPs) or copiers, Toshiba helps mitigate against potential data security breaches. Should one of its hard drives be removed and installed in another MFP, all of the stored data erases.

To learn more about Toshiba, contact MCC’s Document Solutions Division today!