Home Depot Case Essay

824 Words2 Pages

Wikipedia cites Home Depot as the “largest home improvement retailer in the United States”. Unfortunately the company now has on its record “The Biggest Credit Card Theft in History” ,as well. Other attacks on similar companies include the one on TJ Maxx Stores and Target Corp's. Home Depot's incident has been reported as more severe than both of these, compromising the Credit Card information of around 55million Customers.

TARGET

The target in this case happens to be the company itself and its customers. The company has no doubt suffered huge reputation loss. The customers lost their credit card credentials which exposes them to money loss as well as identity theft. The information that was compromised contained customers' names, details about their shopping (which could give an idea about the individual's shopping preferences and financial/social status), their phone numbers, home address etc. The hackers could use the information for making on-line transactions or to simply sell the information on underground cyber crime shops .They chose the latter as reported my many news forums. The information was put on sale on Rescator.cc , a cyber crime shop.

THE VULNERABILITIES

The vulnerabilities in this case were very clear. Three …show more content…

An outdated/weak anti-virus is a vulnerability that leads to a threat of malicious software being injected into the devices or servers. The threat could have been towards availability, integrity , confidentiality and other parameters. The risk of the threat being actually launched (I.e turning into an incident) would be very high in this case, since the company was the largest in America serving billions or more customers across US and Canada. Apparently, this was also the actual vulnerability out of the three that was exploited by the attackers. “Malicious software” was injected into the systems. The actual threat exploited out of all was the one towards

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