Home Depot Cyber Attack Case Study

Prevention of a cyber-attack is the most critical aspect that large and small companies must acknowledge. The problem is expanding, affecting major companies like Target, Sony, JP Morgan, Chase and Home Depot. Home Depot, one of the prime retailers for home improvement in 2014, had a major security breach that affected 56 million credit/debit cards with community banks paying $90 million towards unauthorized charges (Manion, 2015). In this way, Home Depot's failure to stop the malware attack of the perpetrators violated the confidentiality of consumers, while banks accounted for the cost which left Home Depot with a tarnished integrity. The problem was the Home Depot was lax in its IT department and implementation of the new software that encrypts the authorization code for credit cards. Thus, the prevention of the event requires updating software, encrypting data before storing with the implementation of the EMV chip for credit and pin related purchases. The first thing that Home Depot should have done is to prevent the cyber-attack. That is, creating strategies that enforce reactivity to situations of a security breach. Meaning, that

The problem with the P2P is it security is minimal because users without a firewall are at increased susceptibility to malicious codes, spyware, and viruses. However, the positive aspects of the P2P are that its requirement of a four-digit pin that produces a unique site code that is encrypted ("Information protection and security," n.d.). If Home Depot had enabled the P2P and encrypting the data before it reaches the central storage, it is likely to impact to consumers would be fewer. Although all the previous measures help prevent attacks such as Home Depot, there are additional measures that secure security and success for the