The Buck Stops ... Almost Anywhere But Here

There's been a lot of talk about the Target (and, later, Neiman Marcus) data breaches; I've posted about it myself (here).

And there's even been talk about how well (or badly) the affected companies have been responding to the problem, and how this event may speed up the adoption of "smart card" technology used in other parts of the world (as opposed to the magnetic stripe technology used in the US). For example, John Heggestuen at Business Insider thinks that this is "great news" for the payments industry (article, here). Fingers have been pointed at a Russian teen(or two teens) as the "masterminds" of the malware (or not -- see Carol Matlack's analysis of the situation for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, here).

What I haven't seen is an executive from Target or Neiman Marcus taking personal responsibility for the breach.

Compare that to a huge credit-card company breach in South Korea, in which the client data was stolen for as many as 20 million people (in a nation of 50 million). As reported by Choe Sang-Hun in today's New York Times (full article, here),  

The case became known this month when prosecutors arrested a 39-year-old technician hired by the Korea Credit Bureau, a ratings firm that the credit card companies had hired to help improve their systems to protect client data. It was subsequently disclosed that the man stole personal information on 104 million credit cards issued by the KB Financial Group, the NongHyup Financial Group and Lotte Card. 

The man, identified only his last name, Park, stole the data from May 2012 to December 2013, copying it onto a USB device, prosecutors said. The data included the names, phone and South Korean social security numbers, email and residential addresses, salaries, monthly card use and other credit-rating information of clients, the Financial Supervisory Service, a regulatory agency, said in a statement. In many cases, card numbers were stolen as well.

Prosecutors have also indicted two phone marketing company managers on charges of buying the stolen data from the technician. Prosecutors said they found no evidence that the data had circulated any further, but fears spread that the information may have fallen into the hands of financial scammers.

Not surprisingly, people in South Korea are worried and angry, and have been "flooding" the card companies call centers with concern, especially when it was revealed that the stolen data had not even been encrypted. Monday, credit-card company executives offered "compensation for any possible financial losses to consumers", and apologizing to senior politicians for failing to prevent the theft.

But what caught my eye this morning was the photo of three senior executives offering their resignations. When was the last time you saw an American executive offering his resignation for a major corporate failing? Never, right?

Harry S. Truman, where are you?