The Home Depot Data Breaching That Happened In Less Than A Decade Ago (Essay Sample)

Home Depot Data Breach Students Name Institution Affiliation Home Depot Data Breach Data breaching is a certain incidence where more confidential and sensitive or otherwise protected information can be accessed and possibly disclosed in an unauthorized manner. This kind of information may include the personal identity information, health information of an individual, the intellectual property and also it can be the trade secrets. This particular incident in most cases exposes personal information like the credit card details, the healthcare history, the social security number as well as corporate information like the manufacturing process, customer list, and the software codes. If an IT expert or any other individual with such skills access this information without the knowledge of the owner/organization, then data breaching would have taken place. In an event where the information accessed illegally is used for theft or violation of the government, then the offending institution may face legal charges or other civil litigations. This paper, therefore, is aimed at addressing the Home Depot data breaching that happened in less than a decade ago. On September 8th, 2014, Home Depot publicly released a statement about a data breach in their point of the sales payment card system. This retail data breach was very similar to that of Target's in 2013 so this shows that this can easily happen and happens repeatedly. These data breaches can become nightmares and cost the corporation some steep coin. In total, “56 million credit-card accounts and 53 million customer email addresses were stolen” (Banjo, 2014). This is the biggest data breach in retail history thus far. Home Depot stated that they had started the investigation just six days prior to their statement on September 8th. A year prior to the huge hack, Home Depot suffered through two smaller data breaches that raised many eyebrows of outsiders and many professionals in the cyber world urged them to up their security system by using a feature that they had but did not use that added a whole other layer of protection for customers when swiping their cards. They became aware of the 2014 breach when credit card data of its customers went up for sale on the black market. Home Depot stated that these breaches began in April of that year. The hackers used custom software and used ways that were practically the same as the Target breach. The way the hackers got into the Home Depot system was through a third-party login in a Home Depot vendor environment. They installed a zero-day vulnerability in Windows and they were able to use a memory scrap malware on almost 8,000 POS terminals that resulted in the many emails and credit card hacks (Elgin, 2014). The malware was never seen before. It is unsure and hard to tell who the hackers actually are. However, there are two Detroit area men currently in question and could be related to the breach. Many people believe that these people are working out of Russia or other places in Europe so that they are staying out of the United States government sight. There are many reasons as to why the hackers chose to do this. One could be that it was the same hackers that did the Target job or that they were inspired by that job. They saw the money that they made during that and realized that it is hard to get caught in these breaches. The obvious reason that a hacker would do this is that these stores are unbelievably popular and make tons of money day by day. If the hackers got the information of over 50 million customers, they are going to be able to buy some things and make some money with all that information. Frankly, believe that a lot of hackers just do it because they can. They think that it is fun and love to expose such a large company, ...