Data Breaches: Crisis and Opportunity

Chapter 1. Dark Matters

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at a crowded bus station on the east coast. A young man stood in line outside, waiting to purchase a bus ticket from the ticket vending machine so that he could make his way home. He swiped his credit card. The machine spit out a one-way ticket and a receipt. Next.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the machine also recorded the young man’s credit card number in a vast and growing database stored there on the sidewalk, along with millions of other credit card numbers. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Years earlier, a coder who worked for the ticketing system’s vendor was debugging a tricky problem. The machines weren’t processing credit card numbers correctly. He quickly turned on a debugging ...