Home Depot Breach Paper

Introduction – Overview of The Home Depot Case Study

This analysis will explore The Home Depot data breach which occurred on Sept 8th, 2014, one of the nation’s largest security retail compromises of that time. The Home Depot, with over 2,200+ stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico, suffered a historic cyber-attack of significant proportions. The breach was devised by skilled hackers who developed an unknown custom malware that penetrated their payment systems and stole over 56 million credit cards and email addresses from millions of customers. In my research of this case, it was difficult for me to comprehend that the world’s leading home improvement retailer could be so careless given this breach occurred less than a year after the Target data breach in December 2013. This evaluation of The Home Depot will examine the company’s discovery of the breach, their response to customers, improved data security measures, and finally the outcome including present day findings

Their stock prices have continued to rise even during recessions and the data breach. The Home Depot continues to surpass its competitors such as Lowes, and is widely known for their diversification in the industry. I shop at Home Depot for this reason - buy anything online & pick it up in stores.

(Tara T. Seals, 2017) As of March 2017, Info Security Magazine stated that The Home Depot settlements of the data breach are up $179 million and counting but portions are being paid by their insurance company. They went on to report that: “Home Depot agreed to track and manage its data security risk assessments using a risk-exception process, conduct annual reviews of service providers and vendors that have access to payment card information, and create a security-control framework. The retailer also implemented enhanced