The White House Knows When Your Clients Should Disclose Security Breaches

Yesterday Target announced a new CIO and a new card processing system to help minimize the impact of last year’s massive security breach.

Many have faulted the company for being behind the news cycle, only acknowledging that a problem existed after others reported it, and gradually increasing the official estimate of how many customers had been affected.

The biggest PR question at the time was “how and when should clients reveal such security weaknesses?”

This week we got a little advice on that front…from The White House.

As The New York Times reported on Monday, White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel wrote a blog post inspired by the recent “Heartbleed” incident that required everyone to change their passwords (not that we actually did…whoops).

While