Home Depot Hacking

We have all herd of security breaches on corporate servers that has exposed personal and important information that should be secure. Hackers and criminals have been doing this since the invention of the internet and has only increased along with our use and dependency on networks. It is becoming more apparent that company’s need to protect their windows and Unix/Linux servers from known or unknown shortcomings and vulnerabilities from hackers who want to steal information for malicious purposes. Hackers will use codes or malware to corrupt network or operating system of the target company, with the intent to steal information such as proprietary information, personal information including social security numbers, contact information, or any

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.

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

The Home Depot, the home improvement, construction products and services retailer got hit by hackers by compromising the millions of customer’s data. The data of credit cards and debit cards have been stolen by the hackers.

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

As such, he introduces a technique of identifying a spectrum of potential vulnerabilities and suggests procedures to deal with them. Systems Specification and High Order Language Implementation are categorized as items of high risk to attacks. Security Policy and Machine Language Implementation are classified as items of moderate risk of being vulnerable to attacks. Circuits Electronics and Device Physics are of low and very low risks respectively. He also discusses potential threats such as deceiving operating systems to grant access to file or data to unauthorized users through direct (overt) and indirect (convert) channels. Walker also says that lack of precise definition of trusted operating systems and the higher cost of building them are the significant drawbacks faced by the vendors. Vendors are concerned that if they build trusted operating systems, they might not be accepted by their customers. The only solution suggested by the author was to have someone or a company builds it, shares the technology used, and convinces the general public on the significance of it. Once it becomes accepted, then there will be a widespread use of trusted computer operating systems.

On September 8th, 2014, Home Depot claimed that they had experienced a data breach that impacted its payment card system. In order to enter one of Home Depot’s vendor environments, the hackers stole third-party vendor login credentials by using phishing emails. Then they acquired an elevated right that allowed them to penetrate Home Depot’s computer network and install a unique and custom-built malware on the company’s self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada. The malware was able to evade detection by antivirus software over five months and to steal 56 million credit and debit card details as well as 53 million email addresses, making it one of the biggest breaches in 2014.

The article, which addresses security loopholes in modern computing environments, by Loscocco et al highlights what is and has been being done security wise in the past and how secure these implementations were and going forward what should be done to ensure in depth security which guarantees system wide security (1998). The article first explains features of secure operating system and why current systems implemented under the notion of application space security ultimately failed to safe guard the integrity and confidentiality of our assets. The article then continued with general examples of access control and cryptography implemented in the application space with no or little support from operating system and showed their vulnerabilities to attacks such as tampering, bypassing and spoofing. The article supplied real-life examples to support the evidence that building security in the application space without secure operating system is meaningless. The article raised concrete examples on mobile code security, Kerberos network authentication service, IPSEC and SSL network security protocols and firewall. The paper finally put an interesting remark that security implemented in application space without secure operating system is like “building a house in a pile of sand” and it also emphasized that secure operating system without better security on the

Moreover, many organizations within the public and private sector heavily relies on technology to carry out their day to day operations. Those cyber technologies help make many difficult or tedious tasks easier to do and technology can also carry out many of those tasks more effectively and efficiently than humans can. However, cyber technologies are at risk of espionage, cyber attacks, or other crimes such as theft and fraud (Ammori & Poellet, 2010).

Cyber criminals armed with custom-built malware stole an estimated 56 million debit and credit card numbers from Home Depot customers between April and September 2014. This is largest retail card breach on record.

In 2014, one the country’s largest home improvement companies Home Depot was attacked by hackers. The hackers used a vendor’s stolen log-on credentials to penetrate through the company’s network and installed a custom built malware that stole credit card data and email addresses. The attack allowed the hackers to gain access to 56 million credit and debit cards in the US and Canada, and another 53 million e-mail address were also stolen.

The use of information technology in business presents major security challenges, poses serious ethical question, and affects society in significant ways. Especially, the computer crime is a growing threat to society and is caused by the criminal or irresponsible actions of individuals who are taking advantage of the widespread use and vulnerability of computers and the Internet and other networks. It presents a major challenge to the integrity, safety, and survival of most business systems.

In September of 2014, Home Depot announced that they had been the victim of a data breach. The details of the attach shared many similarities with a previous breach at Target. In fact, the attackers gained access the same way that the Target attackers used – insecure access through third-party vendors. Once the hackers gained access, they elevated their privileges and install custom software to steal the credit card information from customers. The resulting data access gained the hackers information on over 53 million email addresses (Vijayan, 2014). In the end, Home Depot ending up spending $13 million to cover out-of-pocket expenses and $6.5 million to protect customers identity information (Stempel, 2016).

Prevalent to the current trend now is the dependency of the society on Information technology and communication systems. Every aspect of human life is one way or the other linked and controlled by information technology tools. The importance of information technology cannot be over emphasized as its unavailability could lead to a form of disaster or the other. Pivotal infrastructures like finance, healthcare, education and security are driven by information technology. However, information technology and its benefits are accompanied by vulnerabilities and risks that can be exploited by people with the necessary technical skills. Individuals like ‘Hackers’ and ‘Cyber Terrorist’ can cause disruption to information systems, commit financial fraud and also attack computers and networks. These attacks and disruptions could result to violence against people and properties. In some cases, death, serious injuries and severe economic loss could occur as a result of these attacks.

Operating systems and security is a broad topic that encompasses software flaws and malware, buffer overflows, virus and worms, malware and detection, software reverse engineering, digital rights management, secure software development and others; but for the sake of simplicity, we will discuss how we can reduce or mitigate that attacks by applying operating system security. We will categorize these security issues in relation to the operating systems security functions, more specifically, the role of trusted OS and the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB).