This week it was revealed that Target suffered a data breach that involved more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts. Target reports that “The unauthorized access may impact guests who made credit or debit card purchases in our U.S. stores from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, 2013.”

Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and CSEE Professor Anupam Joshi discussed the possible consequences of the breach in video reports by local affiliates for both ABC and NBC. Dr. Joshi outlined some of the possible ways that the data breach might have happened and pointed out that while the lost data could be used to make illegal charges to the accounts, it was unlikely to lead to larger identity theft problems.