Well, Home Depots security woes keep expanding, and due to many different types of privacy problems, security weaknesses, mistakes, and/or complete omission of controls. First: In September they reported 56 million credit cards had been exposed to hackers through the use of malware within point of sale terminals and related systems. Second: Today we hear from them that there were also 53 million emails exposed. This is significant for at least two significant reasons: 1) Emails are often used by crooks in phishing attacks to trick people into giving sensitive info, linking recipients to malicious sites, etc. 2) Email addresses are often used as IDs on other sites. The crooks will now be able to take those email addresses and try them as IDs at a wide range of sites, including social media sites, to get access to even more data that they will find valuable. Beware of messages asking you for sensitive information; never give it no matter who it looks like is asking for it. And dont click on links within emails. Third: It was just reported that a Colorado womans Home Depot order came in a box packed with cut-up checks, and bank statements. She was able to put them together to see the valid confidential information of others. Fourth: A Toronto couple applied for and got 100 Home Depot credit cards and racked up over $3 million of fraudulent purchases since 2001, going undetected for that entire time. How many other frauds are going undetected? All four of these security problems involve the exploitation of often very different types of information security control weaknesses. It really is amazing how such diverse security problems exist in one large retailer such as this.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 00:58:31 +0000
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