When foreign hackers penetrated systems at J.P.Morgan Chase (JPM) over the summer, the White House grew alarmed and the Pentagon treated it as a national security incident. When the news became public, however, consumers were interested in … just about anything else.

Serious electronic break-ins have become a top concern for CEOs and a major liability for companies that hold consumer data or any other digital information that might be valuable. Yet consumers seem to have shrugged off a wave of unprecedented attacks against U.S. companies and even become complacent as the attacks have intensified and cybercrime has become commonplace.

New analysis by YouGov BrandIndex, for instance, shows how consumer concerns dissipated in response to successive high-profile hacking incidents at well-known U.S. companies. After hackers attacked Target (TGT) late last year, gaining access to private info on as many as 110 million people, the retailer suffered a 49-point drop in its “buzz” score, which measures whether ordinary consumers have a positive or negative view of the company. Three weeks after the news broke, Target’s buzz score was still depressed by 33 points.

Last month, a cyberattack against Home Depot (HD) exposed data on as many as 56 million credit- and debit-card accounts. Home Depot’s buzz score dipped, then rose, then fell again, bottoming out just 20 points below its starting point. Three weeks later it was only 14 points lower than before the attack. Since specific details about the J.P. Morgan hack --which hit as many as 76 million consumer accounts--became public on October 2, the bank's buzz score has fallen by just 9 points and already begun to bounce back. Here’s a chart showing buzz scores for all three companies, with Day 0 on the horizontal axis representing the day computer attacks became publicly known:

View photos Source: YouGov BrandIndex More

Several factors could explain the fading impact of such breaches. The attack on Target occurred during the holiday shopping season, which could have generated more intense media coverage than it would have any other time of year. If the media played up the story, that would have contributed to the negative perceptions ordinary people held toward Target. The news media may also be covering cyberattacks less intensely as they become more common, with public awareness reflecting declining media coverage.

Target and Home Depot are brands consumers interact with every day, whereas J.P. Morgan may seem like a Wall Street bank that doesn’t affect most people directly. In reality, the bank’s Chase division is one of the largest retail banks in the country. But many news reports about the attack referred to J.P. Morgan rather than Chase, and consumers may not have made the connection.

Still, the biggest reason Americans may not be paying much attention to an epidemic of industrial-strength cyberattacks is they usually don’t pay a price for them. Up till now, banks, retailers and other big companies have borne responsibility for virtually all the damage caused by corporate hacking, and they also bear the cost of defending against them. Some of those costs are probably passed on to consumers, but it’s not as if they’re labeled “cyberprotection fees” and highlighted on bank statements or price tags. Even if consumers do pay a price for hacking, they don’t feel it.

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