Target's Botched Breach Apology

I shop at Target. Not because I'm a diehard Target fan, but because it is the most convenient store to go to on my way home from work.

Therefore, when Target's servers were hacked into near the end of 2013, I was one of the ones notified. Luckily, I was using my wife's credit card. Yay me!

They hacked like 40 million accounts or something of that nature, so I figure I have a better chance of winning the lottery than someone actually stealing my identity, but better safe than sorry and all of that kind of thing.

Anyway, they sent me an email today telling me I can get free ID Protection from Experian. In this "unsolicited" email sent to an address that is no longer used, they provided a link to get started...

I don't know if you can understand the subtlety of this, but let me see if I can come up with an analogy. It would be like Kellog's sending out samples of their peanut butter crackers after doing the salmonella recall because of possible peanut contamination.

Anyway, I looked at the link and it looked valid so I opened up a browser and typed in the link by hand. It was creditmonitoring.target.com for those of you following along. Being that it ended in target.com, I probably could have just clicked on the link.

The funny thing about this website (you can go there if you want) is on the right side it warns us to "be wary of calls or email scams that may appear to offer protection..."

Kind of like saying, "you're here so we know you didn't follow rule number one, but we'll point it out just in case". But, alas, being the adventurous soul that I am, I went ahead with the registration process which involves entering your name and email address to get instructions from Target (within 72 hours). It is super fast technology after all. It may take 72 hours for their super computers to look you up in their system and send you an email. Maybe they should have let their hackers take care of it?

I got the email within 30 minutes with further instructions. These instructions take you to an Experian page where you enter more personal information. After diligently entering all the information, Experian presents me with this:

Basically telling me I've wasted my time. It all seemed legit though. There was no bad grammar or English subtitles. I'd like to thank Target for trying and I am hoping they and their apparent Experian partners didn't join on the Obama bashing bandwagon about the Healthcare Website.