Home Depot

Obama Uses Executive Order To Push Chip and Pin

Add data security to the long list of issues on which U.S. President Barack Obama has resorted to unilateral action in order to push the government forward on a crucial matter. On Friday, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing the government to require the use of so-called “chip and PIN” technology for any newly issued or existing government debit and credit cards. The Order was intended to make the federal government “lead by example in securing transactions and sensitive data,” the White House said in a statement. The new BuySecure Initiative will provide consumers with more tools to secure their financial future by assisting victims of identity theft, improving the Government’s payment security as a customer and a provider, and accelerating the transition to stronger security technologies and the development of next-generation payment security tools. The Order launches a new initiative dubbed “BuySecure” intended to “drive the market towards more secure payment systems” […]

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Chief Security Officer: The Toughest Job In IT?

Register now for our CISO Hangout with Jon Trull of Qualys, the former Chief Security Officer for the State of Colorado. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are in the news a lot these days. The breaches at prominent corporations like Target, Home Depot and (this week) JP Morgan have solidified the consensus that the CISO is a necessary complement to the CIO. They’ve also shone a spotlight on what many consider to be the toughest job in corporate America. After all, successful cyber attacks and data breaches are the quickest path to a ruined corporate reputation. And a strong and capable CISO is increasingly seen as the best defense against such an unfortunate occurrence. (Target’s misfortune was the direct result, some argued, on its lack of a CISO.) With all that in the air, the time couldn’t be better to sit down with some of the top CISOs in industry and the public […]

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Report: Home Depot Fallout Reveals History of Lax Security, Hiring

Its a truism in cyber security that behind every great hack often lies a string of bad decisions and missed opportunities. Its also true that when you dig into the details of damaging cyber incidents, the root causes are personal and psychological as often as they are technical in nature. Organizations -even sophisticated and wealthy organizations – end up making bad decisions for all the wrong reason: failing to properly assess their risk, or pursuing short term savings when long term investment is needed. Home Depot learned via law enforcement that a breach of transaction data exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions, the largest retail credit card breach to date. But as more comes out about the breach at home improvement giant Home Depot, it starts to look a lot more like the root causes there may have started in the HR department rather than the data center. The […]

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Home Depot Acknowledges Breach of Payment Systems

Almost a week after public reports named Home Depot as a possible victim of a sophisticated cyber attack, the home improvement giant has acknowledged that it was hacked.   In a statement on Monday, Home Depot said that an internal investigation confirmed a “breach of our payment data systems” took place. The breach affects the company’s U.S. and Canadian stores, though not its Mexican locations or online transactions, the company said. The incident also appears to have been long-lived. Home Depot estimates that the breach dates to April, 2014. The company did not say when it was finally shut down – though that date could be as late as July. Home Depot has been investigating the incident since it was first disclosed by Brian Krebs at the blog Krebsonsecurity. Krebs was alerted to the incident after large quantities of stolen credit cards began appearing on cyber criminal forums. Sources at […]

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Report: Deep Links Connect Home Depot, Target Hacks

Security reporter Brian Krebs has an intriguing post from Sunday that suggests a link between the massive breach at Target Stores in late 2013 and the recently alleged compromise of systems at home improvement giant Home Depot. Home Depot has yet to acknowledge any theft of customer data from its computer systems. However, according to Krebs, an unnamed “source close to the Home Depot investigation” told him that an analysis of compromised computers at Home Depot revealed that some of the store’s registers were infected with a new variant of BlackPOS, a malicious software program designed to run on Windows-based point of sale (or POS) systems and steal card data when cards are swiped. BlackPOS was found on point-of-sale systems at Target last year.  In March, the security firm Arbor Networks issued a report that cited BlackPOS as one of a number of point of sale system malware families that cyber criminal groups were using heavily: generating new […]

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