Home Depot Inc. said 56 million cards may have been compromised in a five-month attack on its payment terminals, making the breach much bigger than the holiday attack at Target Corp. EARLIER Home Depot confirmed its payment security systems fell victim to a massive cyberattack at nearly 2,200 stores in the U.S. and Canada. WSJ's Shelly Banjo reports. Photo: Getty FROM THE ARCHIVE The large-scale theft of personal and credit-card information at Target is rekindling a long-running debate between banks and retailers over who should bear the costs of a cybersecurity breach. Ryan Tracy reports. Photo: AP. It was the first time the do-it-yourself retailer had defined the scale of a breach it said it was alerted to on Sept. 2. It also said for the first time that the malware has been eliminated from its systems. …show more content…
retailers to hackers that have been targeting their payment systems. Home Depot began a project to fully encrypt its payment terminal data this year, but was outpaced by the hackers, people familiar with the matter have said. The company said Thursday that the project is now complete in the U.S. The Home Depot attack is the latest in a wave of high-profile hackings at big merchants in recent months, ranging from high-end retailer Neiman Marcus Group Ltd. to grocer Supervalu Inc. to Asian restaurant chain P.F. Chang's China Bistro Inc. Although the number of affected cards wasn't disclosed before, the attack already had appeared large enough to prompt big card-issuing banks including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to start replacing customers' debit and credit cards that were exposed in the attack. Capital One Financial Corp. said late Wednesday night that it, too was planning to reissue payment cards. Advertisement The breach at Target affected 40 million credit and debit