Five Important Lessons from Recent Data Breaches

Send clear messages

Consider communications to potential victims with great care. Target made yet another egregious error by notifying customers of the breach via poorly considered, suspicious-looking email communications. The email included a suspicious sender with the address: TargetNews@target.bfi0.com instead of @target.com. Plus, it directed users to click on a link for additional details on the monitoring. The bizarre “bfi0” in the subdomain suggested nothing official to differentiate it from phishing and malware-laden emails sent by scammers following such corporate data breaches; scammers often make subtle tweaks. Because the notice was delivered via email and since it originated from a suspicious email address, the original message ended up in junk mail boxes.