On September 20, 2013, Target Corporation was certified compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Eight weeks later, malware was running on nearly every cash register in the company's 1,793 stores.

This episode traces the full attack path — from a stolen HVAC contractor password to 40 million compromised payment cards — and examines why every control that could have stopped the breach already existed in published security guidance years before it happened.

We cover: the Fazio Mechanical entry point, the network segmentation gap, how BlackPOS exploited the moment card data exists as plaintext in RAM, why FireEye's alerts went unacknowledged for 12 days, the exfiltration architecture that moved stolen data through three countries during peak shopping hours, and the compliance paradox at the center of it all.

Full technical breakdown: zerodaylogs.com

Primary sources: U.S. Senate Commerce Committee "Kill Chain" analysis, Target SEC filings, multistate AG settlement, NIST and PCI-DSS standards.