In the specific hacks I was thinking of, they didnt hoard and store any info. Equipment was installed that siphoned credit card info from their payment systems. I cant think of a way to run a store without passing credit card info through your payment processing system to the banks.

Agreed, credit cards are a ridiculous necessity. I think in this case the credit card companies should be liable.

I am continually amazed by the simple solution bitcoin provides to this problem: instead of me giving you an account number that you (or anyone who gets the number) pull(s) money from, you give me a number that I push money to. It's going to be a long time before that kind of change in our payment systems (from pull to push, whether with bitcoin or some other system) can be widely implemented.

"I think in this case the credit card companies should be liable."

Maybe? I didnt see anything about home depot suing the contractors? Really, they should be held financially and criminally liable.(if they werent)

The public ledger part of bitcoin is great also. You can see where the stolen money went. Maybe if they added a way to flag money, so spending stolen bitcoin would trigger an alert at the merchant, the same way canceled credit cards do now.

re: the contractors being liable, currently the way things work is, when my credit card is used fraudulently the credit card company owns that and pays me back, which is the least they could do. I don't even know if they attempt to work with law enforcement to catch the actual fraudsters, but I sure hope they do. Maybe I should be more proactive about that? I don't know.

EDIT: I should point out I don't know any details about the Home Depot "hack" and I might not be addressing all the pertinent points of that particular incident. Bottom line is still the same, it shouldn't be the customers who suffer when this happens. The people that made it so easy for my personal information to leak, the ones who necessitated that my personal information even be required as part of the transaction, should be the ones feeling the pain.

I guess the details are still not known? I was confused by the target hack in my earlier comment(sorry). That was where hvac contractors had their credentials stolen, and malware was installed on their pos system. The home depot hack was malware suspected to have been installed on their self checkout machines[1].

" it shouldn't be the customers who suffer when this happens. The people that made it so easy for my personal information to leak, the ones who necessitated that my personal information even be required as part of the transaction, should be the ones feeling the pain"

I get what you mean about some services collecting everything they can, and not taking the best possible care of it. I agree with you there. I was trying to point out an exception where there isnt anything that can be done. For example, try and stop finfisher :)[2] Companies will get hacked, and it is not always negligence. I was trying to point out that you wouldn't blame a shopkeeper if an armed robber stole credit card info, but if he left it in an unlocked room then we should. And I dont think either home depot or target were collecting more than they needed to.

PS, if anyone has a link as to how we can be more proactive about working with law enforcement to catch the fraudsters, I would love to see it. Either from the point of view of a consumer, or service provider.

1. http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/09/home-depot-56m-cards-impa...

2. http://news.softpedia.com/news/finfisher-s-account-of-how-he...

Perhaps the hack becomes tricking the consumer into pushing to the wrong address. Is that the consumer's fault? I agree that the current system is vulnerable, but perhaps we just get different hacks, not no hacks.

At least it'd be noticed instantly then.

> It's going to be a long time before that kind of change in our payment systems can be widely implemented.

That's how bank transfers work, though.

SWIFT's had its own set of issues:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-heist-swift-idUSKCN1...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/the-hack-that-c...

Build a system that's not based off of shared secrets.

Now if only someone would invent a mechanism by which a public and a private key could somehow be combined and only the public part shared....