[dhyasama]

Two questions:

1. How do you get 40 million cards in a day from scraping RAM? Wouldn't it be limited to live transactions? 40m seems like a huge number of transactions for one day. An average ticket of $50 would make it a 2 billion dollar day.

2. Why does the card data need to be decrypted on the POS system? Why can't it be sent to a central service and decrypted there and an authorization code is sent back?

[er0k]

From Target's press release, this happened between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, so it's closer to three weeks. Dec. 15 was just the first day they confirmed the problem.