US retail giant Target has apologised to customers after hackers stole payment card and personal information from the company’s data bases.<br /><br />Forty million credit and debit records and 70 million other records were affected.<br /><br />In a letter the company’s CEO Gregg Steinhafel said customers would have ‘zero liability’ for any fraud losses from the data breach which took place around Thanksgiving. <br /><br />“We don’t know the full extent of what transpired. But what we do know was there was malware installed on our point-of-sale registers. That much we’ve established. We removed that malware so that we could provide a safe and secure shopping environment,” he said.<br /><br />The US Congress has called for an inquiry. Lawmakers want to know if Target was ill prepared for such an attack and why they delayed in notifying customers. .
