Large scale data breaches have made for big time headlines in the past few months. The most notorious being the Target data breach over the holiday season with 40 million debit and credit card accounts compromised.

Time magazine reported on May, 23 that Ebay was also hit with a massive cyberattack that exposed the account information of 100 million users. The Attorney Generals of Florida, Connecticut and Illinois along with the authorities in the EU and UK have opened an investigation into this cyberattack.

Lately, there has been quite a bit of mention of a "Heartbleed" Security Flaw. Unless you are an active web developer maintaining some form of website, you are unlikely to be privy as to what Heartbleed actually is.

Heartbleed is not a technical term, but is rather a pseudonym for the failure of the popular encryption library, OpenSSL (Open Secure Sockets Layer).

The primary purpose behind implementations of OpenSSL on websites was to encrypt sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card information. 

What do we learn from 40 million credit cards?

If you happen to be Target, hopefully you learn the importance of P2P encryption (also called point-to-point or end-to-end encryption).

40 million is the number of credit cards compromised when hackers exploited the chain’s point-of-sale system. Target’s not alone, either. Michael’s and Sally Beauty Supply have joined the ranks of companies realizing that in this data-dependent economy, appropriate security is vital to business. The best way to avoid credit card data breaches is with P2P encryption.