Stolen Target Credit Cards Selling for $20 to $100

As you might expect, credit card hackers move fast. Many of the 40 million cards compromised in the recent Target breach are up for sale (or already scooped up) on the black market, reports Krebs on Security. Reporter Brian Krebs gets into the nitty gritty of how these underground "card shops" work and finds that the Target cards are going for $20 to more than $100 apiece. One bit of good news: It doesn't appear that the stolen data includes the three-digit number on the rear of the cards, meaning they probably won't be used for online shopping.

Still, the hackers have access to customer names and all the data that was embedded on the cards' magnetic stripes, so making dupes to sell wouldn't be all that difficult, notes the LA Times. It's a mess, writes Kashmir Hill at Forbes. "Ideally, banks and credit card companies would just go ahead and cancel all affected cards, but that’s expensive for them and a headache for last minute Christmas shoppers." (More Target stories.)