Cybercrime is a crime which in involves a computer, which is used as a tool to commit a crimes like hacking, phishing or spamming. Cybercrime essentially requires a network other than the computer in commission of the crime. The most common examples of the cyber crime are online banking data theft and identity theft. Home Depot’s sales system had experienced a similar data breach in their payment card system in the year 2014 (Hawkins, 2015). The social and the economic impact of this data breach are elaborated in the following paragraphs.
The Home Depot Data Breach
The hackers with an intention to steal the data related to payment card, infiltrated the POS network of the sales system of the Home Depot. The attacker could gain access to the Home Depot’s vendor platform by using a third party login details. After getting to access the Home Depot network, the hackers installed a memory scrapping malware, which could access over 56 million credits, debit card details, and the email address of the users as well (Perlroth, 2014). The hackers then put the stolen data to sale, which were bought by the carders. This occurred mainly because Home Depot was using an outdated version of Antivirus in its point sales devices. Moreover, the card details were not encrypted prior to the transfer to the POS network.
Social Impact
The data breach resulted in the identification theft of millions of customers. The hackers also stole the email ids of the customers. As a result, the customers suffered a huge financial loss. Although the financial losses were repayed by the Home Depot authorities, the loss of contact details and email ids posed as a threat. It gave rise to the increasing trust issues of the customers towards Home Depot.
Economical Impact
The Home Depot data-breach incurred as total loss of $263 million. The malware that infected the Home Depot processing system comprised with the 56 million credit and debit card details (Depot, 2014). The affected customers were provided with credit services as compensation. The total expense incurred due to the data breach also includes the investigation expenses that were carried out by Home Depot after the breach, the cost of providing identity protection services to the customers, legal costs and the costs to cover up the losses incurred due to the fraud and re issuing of the new credit and debit cards. This huge loss could have been avoided if the Company would have not compromised with the data security essentials like a proper antivirus and P2P encrypted channels (Edwards, Hofmeyr & Forrest, 2016).
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that, Home Depot could have easily avoided the Data breach and a huge financial loss if they had not compromised with an up to date security system. The social impact was huge as the reimbursement of the money to the victims took a considerable amount of time. The people who used payment cards on the self-checkout terminal of Home depot in their US and Canada stores were affected the most.
References
Depot, T. H. (2014). The home depot reports findings in payment data breach investigation.
Edwards, B., Hofmeyr, S., & Forrest, S. (2016). Hype and heavy tails: A closer look at data breaches. Journal of Cybersecurity, 2(1), 3-14.
Hawkins, B. (2015). Case Study: The Home Depot Data Breach. Retrieved January, 19, 2016.
Perlroth, N. (2014). Home Depot data breach could be the largest yet. The New York Times.
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