Target Data Breach and the Lack of Journalism

I work pretty close to a Target.  So close that my wife sends me Target to pick up baby supplies from time to time.  Unlucky for me, my wife sent me on November 27th.  That is the first day that credit cards started getting stolen from Target.

Like all Target customers, I want to know what happened.  As an avid Krebs On Security reader, I knew I would find a great explanation on what happened there.  For technical news that makes it to the mainstream, I like to compare what the mainstream says versus what the technical sites say.  For issues like the Federal Affordable Care Act exchange, I found the mainstream to report on the opposite of what the technical sites reported on.  For the Target data breach, I found that nobody was doing any actual investigation, except for Brian Krebs.

Every article I found about the data breach seemed to have similar wording as the various blog posts on Krebs.  Some articles seemed to quote Krebs word for word but didn't actually put quotes (") around the words.  All of them refer to Krebs but most of them never actually linked to the source material.  When I finally pulled up Krebs, I was surprised how much more information was available in his posts versus what was in the mainstream media.  He goes into detail about the discovery process and other interesting details.

I find it disappointing that the media doesn't link to Krebs'es website.  The reason they call it the World Wide Web is because sites link to each other.  Online news organizations don't want you to leave their website.  They also can't rip off an entire expose by Krebs.  I am fine with them giving minimal (dumbed down) information.  When articles are posted about international relations, economics or California state law, I appreciate that the articles are dumbed down.  This allows me to quickly get a general understanding of the topic.  I wish they would post reference links so that I can easily drill down to learn more details for the topics.  Some topics, like economics, I don't fully understand but I can understand the more technical publications.  At first, I thought this desire was a result of reading too many academic papers.  Then I remembered high school English class where I was taught to cite my sources.

As for the Krebs coverage of the data breachs, the part that I am most interested in was not covered: there was no detail on how the data breach occurred.  This is not a surprise.  The breach is too new.  I'm sure one day in the future I will be reading the front page of Krebs and will see a post about how it happened.