Home Depot Security Breaches 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.

Online Defense 101 Statistics show that most security breaches are direct results of insider misconduct rather than being hacked. According to the most recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, about “285 million records were compromised in 2008.” Seventy-four percent of the incidents were from inside sources. Users are more likely to be victims of computer virus infections, inquisitive students/co-workers, and hardware failures than to be victims of an Internet security attack.

This case study, written in 2009 is not the only case where a major data breach has occurred within organizations. In the late 2011 Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) was breached impacting up to 77 million user’s accounts including data on names, address and possibly credit card details. In late 2013 Target had a cyber-attack that compromised a large quantity of its data and had 110 million accounts compromised. Finally in September 2014 Apple had their iCloud server breached by hacking that compromised all the users of the online server. These occurrences still have some unanswered questions and several experts have yet to decipher the actual reason as to why the security breach occurred.

The Home Depot-Data Breach Abstract 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. However the breach occurred long time ago but went unrecognized. They suspected

In 2014 there was a security breach that attacked Home Depot’s payment terminal’s which affected 56 million credit card and debit card numbers. The attack estimated about a cost of $194 per customer from credit fraud and re-issuance cost. Making this breach bigger than the holiday attack at target. This attack was reported on September 2nd and its said that was also when the malware was taken off. But the hackers were too fast and began attacking retailers by targeting their payment system.

There are many ways to help prevent breaches such as the Home Depot and the similar Target breach. Most retailers these days have multiple locations possibly in two or more countries like The Home Depot. Because of this the retailers need to know exactly where the business of the organization is being conducted. These organizations need to take the extra steps and know where the customer data is at all times especially payment information. They need to keep track of how it is being accessed and how it is being secured. Tom Bain, who is a senior vice president at a company called Security CounterTack, says “Retailers need to get a better grasp on who is being granted access to their networks and why” (Vijayan). Home Depot failed to do this on a daily basis and this is why the breach was so extensive. People do not know the reason as to why the company did not check these daily logs for payment information but this is the reason that they had such a big breach on their payment systems.

Target’s initial media communication to the public was ineffective because Target took more than 24 hours to release an announcement about the security breach after the story broke, which destroyed the corporation’s reputation and credibility. According to Eric Dezenhall, the CEO of public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, Brian Krebs reported the first story of Target’s security breach via a blog post on Dec. 18, 2013. Krebs is a national expert, former Washington Post reporter, and credible blogger who have been covering in-depth security news and investigation for more than fourteen years. Krebs alleged, during the past few days, “Target is investigating a data breach potentially involving millions of customer credit and debit card records”

Introduction Over the last few years the amount of security breaches that have been reported have had one factor that has been prevalent in majority of the attacks. That factor is the employee’s and how they are manipulated into giving the intruder/hacker exactly what they needed without realizing it.

Home Depot Security Breach: 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 2013, The US retailer was had one of the largest security breaches for a US retailer. From Nov 24th to Dec 15th hackers were able to steal 40 million credit cards records using the Zeus virus for entry. They then manipulated the POS system to record all credit cards and debit cards. The Zeus virus has been able to infect more then 3.6 million pc and continues to do so. The hackers were able to access Target’s network through a third party vendor and access core systems to begin there chaos. Target’s IT security actually was able to identified the malware with FireEye during the breach but did not act due to failure in security process. The total damage of this breach is estimated to be 252 million and brought a larger spotlight on

Annotated Bibliography Items Annotated Bibliography 1 (M. Cline, Carl & Andrew 2010) “The impact of organizational change on Information systems http://www.cluteinstitute.com/ojs/index.php/JBER/article/viewFile Research Objective: The main theme of this research paper is to protect sensitive information that any organization or business possess. With community’s increasing reliance on information systems and technology there is scope for security breaches, more likely to happen. Not only monetary loss it can create damage to information assets that has sensitive data. To secure these assets from any internal or external damage organizations has to follow proposed rules and guidelines. Also security responsibilities

York Robeson 5-6th period Mr. brown 9/29/15 Cyber security is critical in any business or organization. The purpose for cyber security is in the name, “security”. All types of information that are important or ment to be secured requires cyber security to defend it. For example if you submitted personal information online regarding maybe your address or even perhaps your social security number, you would not want that information falling into the wrong hands. So I will begin to talk about a cyberattack and how it was executed. The OPM data breach ( office of personal management ). 21 million current and former federal employees had their personal and highly sensitive private information stolen in a massive data breach that highly affected

Conclusion and Recommendations Conclusion After analyzing and investigating these three cases handled by major companies, it is clear that both eBay and Home Depot did outstanding jobs in successfully solving their problem. EBay and Home Depot took quick actions and engaged in a series of analyses to identify the cause of cyber

ntroduction: Data breaches happen daily, in too many places at once to keep count. But there is some huge breach versus a small one and we will take some examples from the biggest or most significant breaches of the 21st century to show how much risk or damage the breach caused for companies, insurers and users or account holders.

While all of these technologies have enabled exciting changes and opportunities for businesses, they have also created a unique set of challenges for business managers. Chief among all concerns about technology is the issue of information security. It seems to be almost a weekly occurrence to see a news article about yet another breach of security and loss of sensitive data. Many people will remember high profile data breaches from companies such as T.J Maxx, Boston Market, Sports Authority, and OfficeMax. In the case of T.J. Maxx, a data breach resulted in the loss of more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers. In many of these incidents, the root cause is a lack of adequate security practices within the company. The same technologies that enable managers can also be used against them. Because of this, businesses must take appropriate steps to ensure their data remains secure and their communications remain