Home Depot Security Breach Case Study

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.

An unauthorized and highly sophisticated malware that not been encountered previously by any security company attacked the point-of-sale systems where all the card information is stored. The outcome of this hacking been extensive and affected millions of customer’s personal and payment data was exposed, results in the payment card compromise of three million customers.

In December 2013, the CEO, Gregg Steinhafle, of Target announced that their company was affected by a data breach that occurred between November 27 and December 15, 2013. “Target disclosed that online thieves hacked into its computer system, stealing credit card or personal information from more than 100 million customers. Both personal data and credit card information may have been stolen from about 12 million people” (Abrams, 2014). The outcome of this breach has cost Gregg Steinhafle his job, as well as the trust of Target’s consumers, investors, and close to $150 million in breach-related costs. This breach is considered one of the largest retail data breaches in U.S. history due to the amount of personal data and credit card

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 second security breach case is of Barnes & Noble. In September 2012, hackers stole credit card information of customers who shopped at sixty-three Barnes & Noble stores across the United States, which included New York City, San Diego, Miami and Chicago. The company discovered customer information had been stolen but kept the incident quiet per the request of the Justice Department so the F.B.I. could find out who was behind the intrusion (Huffington Post, 2012).

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

Between November 27th, 2015 and December 15, 2015, someone hacked into Targets database and stole critical information. Target said that the thieves stole massive amounts of credit and debit card information during the holiday season also took names, addresses, and phone numbers of 70 million customers. This was information that could put victims at greater risk for identity theft.

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

Once on Target’s network with elevated privileges the attackers were able to launch malware to the POS systems that would capture the credit card information of the consumers as they swiped their cards to pay for their items. They launched a second piece of malware that that would take the captured information and move it to a dump server on the internal network. Once the information was on the dump server it them

(April 2015) today our financial and personal information is everywhere. It is in our phones for mobile payments, in our wallets on our credit cards and in the data centers and clouds of the companies and third parties that complete transactions on our behalf. With so much personal information—quite literally—floating around various access points, it has never been more lucrative or easy for cyber-criminals to access and mine private information to sell on the black market.The Target data breach at the end of 2013, which affected the card payment information of more than 40 million shoppers and the personal data of almost 70 million consumers, kick-started a continuous barrage of point-of-sale (POS) attacks affecting consumers, businesses and banks throughout 2014. Between the breaches at Dairy Queen, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus, it seemed like cyber-criminals were always one step ahead of the game, using malware and card-skimming techniques to gain access to confidential

In the midst of the holiday season, Target shoppers were shocked in December 2013 when the news came out, 40 million Target credit cards had been stolen (Krebs, 2013f) by accessing data on point of sale (POS) systems (Krebs, 2014b). Target later revised that number to include private data for 70 million customers (Target, 2014). The breach transpired between November 27 and December 15th 2014 (Clark, 2014). Over 11 GB of data was stolen (Poulin, 2014). Target missed internal alerts and found out about the breach when they were contacted by the Department of Justice (Riley, Elgin, Lawrence & Matlack, 2014).

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.

On December 15, 2013, Target released a statement confirming that malware had been installed and that most of it eliminated. Accordingly, reports indicated that Fazio computer approved the proposal of project management and the intruders’ compromised agreement publicizing to the company reportedly, the report reads. Besides, media reports indicated victimization of Fazio for phishing email comprising the malware Target used for installing another malware on the system of target, together with Target’s Point of Sale (POS) system used in recording transactions of cards and all payments. Cybercrime or internet hacking, according to Computer Crime Research Center Aghatise E. Joseph, is an internet crime committed using a computer as a tool or a victim targeted. Notably, it is much challenging to categorize general internet crimes into distinct groups since most cybercrimes evolve on a daily basis.

After reading the article about the Target data security breach and how Target handled the PR, I agree with the author’s stance on how bad Target handled the PR of the data security breach. Target didn’t tell anyone about the data security breach even though they knew, instead someone else broke the story. Target did the opposite of the five principles of crisis communication, Target knew about the issue but wasn’t prepared to go public with it or communicate the issue with the press and other constituencies, and be honest to the public about what is going on. Instead, somebody else had to break the news. Also, Target wasn’t clear what it was doing to remedy the issue and didn’t mean it instead Target states the typical speech every company makes “we are taking this issue seriously”.

In the last decade it’s amazing how technology has advanced over the years and will continue to advance for many years to come. Every year there is a new cell phone from Apple or Samsung, with new features that make our lives more convenient. From faster software to higher picture quality and so on. I am unable to recall the last time I used a camera to take pictures or went to the bank to deposit a check. Technology advances every day and many can’t wait to see what’s next to come. But with new technology comes greater risk for violations of privacy. In the following research paper I will discuss the types of security breaches and the cost associated with these breaches that businesses around the world face on a daily basis.