Home Depot Breach Case Study

The Home Depot-Breach

Introduction

The Home Depot is an American retailer of home improvement and construction products and services. It operates many big-box format stores and has over 2200 stores across the United States which includes Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands as well as all ten provinces of Canada and Mexico. The company is headquartered at the Atlanta Store Support Centre in Cobb County, Georgia.

In terms of overall revenue reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is the largest home improvement retailer in the United States. Home Depot holds the dominant position in the U.S. home improvement industry which accounts for approximately 60% of all revenues. The store operates out of large warehouse-style

It involved almost all its stores across the United State of America and Canada. The breach which involved over 56 million card details and 53 million email addresses was as a result of a new malicious software program which enabled the hackers to steal customer’s information. The Home Depot breach was more than the ‘Target’ breach which affected over 40 million credit and debit cards.

The Home Depot attack was as a result of a software that was slipped into the companies' networks and used to skim payment-card data. Home Depot said that its investigation has determined the criminals used "unique custom-built malware" that was not present in other attacks. This made it more difficult to quickly notice. Home Depot didn't identify the point of entry for the hackers, but stated that the malware has been eliminated from its systems.

Trend Micro in 2014 had published a blog post which stated that a newly identified ‘BlackPOS’ was in circulation and it was targeting retail accounts. The ‘BlackPOS’ malware captures card details from the memory of point-of-sale devices and disguises itself as part of an antivirus product running on a