Target Customer Information Shows Up on the Black Market

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from bits.blogs.nytimes.com

A Target customer preparing to sign a credit card receipt at a store in Miami on Thursday. The company disclosed that hackers had recently stolen credit or debit card numbers for 40 million customers who had shopped in its stores. The nightmare before Christmas continues for Target. Stolen Target customer information from a security breach involving its in-store point-of-sale systems has already begun flooding the black market, according to numerous people in the fraud industry tracking the situation. On Dec. 11, one week after hackers breached Target’s systems, Easy Solutions, a company that tracks fraud, noticed a ten- to twentyfold increase in the number of high-value stolen cards on black market web sites, from nearly every bank and credit union. The black market for credit card and debit card numbers is highly sophisticated, with numerous card-selling sites that are indistinguishable from a modern-day e-commerce site. Many sell cards in bulk to account for the possibility of cancellations. Some go for as little as a quarter. Corporate cards can sell for as much as $45. But the security blogger Brian Krebs, who first broke news of the Target security breach on his website, said some Target customers’ high-value...

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Target Bans the Box

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com

Sanctions that make it more difficult for ex-offenders to obtain jobs, housing and even basic documents like drivers’ licenses only serve to drive them back to jail. With that in mind, a growing number of states and municipalities now prohibit public agencies — and in some cases private employers — from asking about a job applicant’s criminal history until the applicant reaches the interview stage or gets a conditional job offer. These eminently sensible “ban the box” laws are intended to let ex-offenders prove their qualifications before criminal history issues enter the equation. Earlier this year Minnesota extended its existing law to cover private employers. Now, the Minneapolis-based Target Corporation, one of the nation’s largest employers, has announced that it will remove questions about criminal history from its job applications throughout the country. The announcement represents an important victory for the grassroots community group TakeAction Minnesota, which had been pressuring the company to change. This comes on the heels of a similar development earlier this month in California, where Gov. Jerry Brown signed a ban-the-box bill that applies to government employers. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gave this movement a lift last year, when it expanded and updated a ruling that barred employers from...

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Target unveils sweeping changes to product safety standards

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.mercurynews.com

Target this week laid out a new policy that pressures manufacturers of beauty supplies and household cleaners to remove harmful chemicals from their products, one of the most expansive initiatives from a major retailer to give consumers safer options for what they use on their faces and kitchen counters. The big-box retailer has revealed details of its new Sustainable Product Standard, a program to assess the safety of more than 7,500 household cleaners and beauty, cleaning and baby care products sold in Target's 1,700-plus stores. Target's crackdown on hazardous chemicals and its tough demands on the largely unregulated personal care products industry is yet another landmark in the movement for safer consumable goods, a global phenomenon driven largely by consumers and activist groups. "Consumer demand for transparency and safer products has grown too loud for companies to ignore," said Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which last month pressured Target to sell safer beauty products. "The largest retailers are now, for the first time, indicating in a very public way that they want their vendors to move away from the most hazardous chemicals and be more forthcoming about what's in their products." Target also will collaborate with the campaign, a coalition of environmental and health organization, to create new safety standards for rating cosmetics beginning in 2014. The personal care products industry maintains all its goods...

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