The Home Depot confirms and eliminates malware threat

The company also has completed a payment security project that provides encryption of payment data at the point-of-sale in the company’s US stores, offering protection for customers. Roll-out of encryption to Canadian stores will be complete by early 2015. Canadian stores are already enabled with EMV chip-and-PIN technology.

The company’s investigation has determined the following: criminals used unique, custom-built malware to evade detection and the cyber-attack is estimated to have put payment card information at risk for approximately 56 million unique payment cards.

To protect customer data until the malware was eliminated, any terminals identified with malware were taken out of service, and the company quickly put in place other security features. The hackers’ method of entry has been closed off, the malware has been eliminated from the company’s systems, and the company has rolled out enhanced encryption of payment data to all US stores.

The company’s new payment security protection locks down payment data through encryption, which takes raw payment card information and scrambles it to make it unreadable and virtually useless to hackers.