Home Depot Breach Case Study

In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many

During the last Christmas season, Target announced that their data security was breached. According to David Lazarus in Los Angeles Times, Target stated that roughly 110 million customers’ information was illegally taken from their database. The information included their credit/debit card info, phone numbers, and email addresses. Target is one of the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.; they have a substantial amount of consumers. Because of this incident, consumers' trusts for the store have been decreasing. Worrying about losing its customers, the company offered a free year of credit monitoring and identity-theft protection, so the customers will feel more secure. Not only Target, some other large retailers also faced the same issues. They want their customers to trust that the companies can protect private data. However, should we not worry? Data breaches have been going on for about a decade, but we have not seriously thought about the issue. In order to protect people’s privacy, the federal government should make new laws concerning companies’ handling of customer information.

The Home Depot and Target have been one of the many retail establishments cyber attack breaches that have being targeted by cyber attackers. The Home Depot was the target of a cyberattack payment card system breach where their credit card information was basically stolen on September of 2014. The attacked occurred by attackers gaining third party credentials in order to gain access to the system, after they gained access to the system they weakened the system gaining their own access privileges. After doing all the mentioned above, malware was installed quickly on Home Depot’s self-check-out system. All these steps where taking by the cyber attackers resulting in the loss of more than fifty million credit card accounts and email addresses.

The Target data breach remains one of the most notable breaches in history, it was the first time a CEO of a major corporation was fired due to a security event. The breach received an enormous amount of attention, it caused corporations and individuals to change the way they think about information security and data protection. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2013 hackers gained access to 40 million customer credit cards and personal data of 70 million Target customers. The intruders slipped in by using stolen credentials and from there gained access to vulnerable servers on Targets network to launch their attack and steal sensitive customer data from the POS cash registers. All this occurred without a response from Targets security operations center, even though security systems notified them of suspicious activity. The data was then sold on the black market for an estimated $53 million dollars. However, the cost to Target, creditors, and banks exceeded half of a billion dollars. This report will review how the infiltration occurred, what allowed the breach to occur including Targets response, and finally who was impacted by the security event.

What do Premara Blue Cross, Anthem, Chick-fil-A, Sony, USPS, MCX, Staples, Kmart, Dairy Queen, SuperValue, Jimmie John's, Viator, Home Depot, PF Chang's, Community Health Systems, and JP Morgan all have in common? Each of these companies were hacked during 2014-2015. Sadly, this is just a short list showing the breadth of industries and size of operations that are vulnerable. According to Time Magazine in March, 2015, "You're not just imagining it: Lately, a new data breach has been reported almost every week."

During the dates of November 27 through December 2013, the department store Target experienced a data breach in which approximately 40 million customers credit and debit cards were exposed. During this breach, customer’s personal information may have also been exposed for use of possible fraud. January 2014, Target

On December 18, 2013, one of the security bloggers, Brian Krebs, posted in his blog that Target, one of the biggest US retailers, had suffered a massive data breach. The next day, Target announced that data from more than 40 million credit and debit card accounts had been stolen from its systems, and noting that they started a thorough investigation. Perhaps learning from Target’s mistakes, other organizations could achieve a goal of better protecting themselves and their customers’ information.

During the dates of November 27 through December 2013, the department store Target experienced a data breach in which approximately 40 million customers credit and debit cards were exposed. During this breach, customer’s personal information may have also been exposed for use of possible fraud. January

The Target Corporation was exploited in December 2013 and then again in 2015. These breaches included customer’s personal identifying information and retailer’s data. This credit card data breach is a prime example of weak security and infrastructure. This breach happened over the course of one of the United States’ major holiday seasons, Christmas. The security issue involved hackers accessing Target’s customer 's credit and debit cards by the machines that were being used to swipe the cards. These hackers accessed Target’s network with a stolen username and password from a company that was providing refrigeration and HVAC services. This company could access Target’s network `remotely to monitor energy consumption and temperatures. With that, the hackers uploaded malware software on the Target’s credit card machines. The customer data hack happened across the nation, and it was performed in stores and not an online breach of Target customer information.

Home depot was the target of a cyberattack on their information system infrastructure that lasted from April of 2014 to September of 2014. As a result of the attack and following data breach, 56 million credit-card accounts and 53 million email addresses were stolen. (“Home Depot Hackers Exposed 53 Million Email Addresses”) The cyberattack involved several steps. First, the attackers gained third party credentials allowing them into the system. Next they exploited an unknown weakness in the system that allowed for the attackers to elevate their own access privileges. Finally, they installed malware on Home Depot’s self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada, allowing

Thank you for calling me over this weekend in response to my complaint with your organization. In following up, I am memorializing the content of our conversation as I understand the facts:

From November 27 to December 15, 2013 Target Corporation released 70 million customers’ personal information. On average, it takes companies 200 days to uncover they are being hacked (Lunden, 2015). It only took Target 12 days to figure out the crisis that began happening. On December 19, Target originally said only 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been compromised during Black Friday weekend to December 15. “The information stolen included customer names, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and CVV” (McGrath, 2014). Although Target never clarified how they were hacked, security experts say that hackers targeted their POS system. “Target spent $61 million through Feb. 1 responding to the breach, according

The attack on Home Depot in 2014 happened from hackers that retrieved stolen vendor login credentials which allowed access to home depot’s system. the hackers then install malware on home depot’s payment system, which helped the hackers steal the credit

In the middle of the holiday season, Target shoppers were knocked off their feet with the news that in December 2013 that 40 million Target credit card numbers had been stolen (Krebs, 2013f) by someone accessing Target’s data on their point of sale (POS) systems (Krebs, 2014b). To make matters worst Target later revised their number to include the private data for 70 million of their customers (Target, 2014). The breach took place period of November 27 through December 15th 2013 (Clark, 2014). Target had gotten taken for over 11 GB of their data that had been stolen (Poulin, 2014). Target did not catch their internal alerts and was informed about the breach when they were contacted by the Department of Justice (Riley, Elgin,

Aside from the Playstation Outage, there had been larger and more nefarious data breaches in history that exploited weaknesses in internet, server, and network security. One such breach is when Heartland Payment Systems had, what was called, the most massive credit card security breach in history, with hackers embedding deep into Heartland security and recording card data. According to Bloomberg Business, it was estimated that “as many as 100 million cards issued by more than 650 financial services companies may have been compromised”. The attack cost Heartland $12.6 million, which was orchestrated by a man named Albert Gonzalez, who was also the cause for several other data breaches, each costing from thousands to millions of dollars. Another such attack was when Russian, and a Ukrainian, computer hackers assaulted NASDAQ stock exchange servers and stealing “more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers, target more than 800,000 bank accounts” (NY Daily News). Separate hacking operation spanned over seven years, attacking NASDAQ, but also affected “chains like 7-Eleven”. All the operations, in the period of time and the global scale it spanned, resulted “in at least $300 million in losses to companies and individuals”. One of the latest, and possibly the largest, data breaches of 2015, Anthem, the second largest health insurer in the US was hacked, compromising millions of account and personal data, as well as social security. When Anthem discovered that they had been