TJ Maxx Data Breach Everyday millions of people go out and shop and pay with their credit or debit cards believing that all their information is safe and protected, but more than 45 million people would learn that shopping isn’t as safe as they believed. In 2007 more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers were taken from a TJ Maxx mainframe and used to make fraudulent charges all because of a weak security system for the wireless network in one store. This resulted in lost of trust in the security of making purchases with credit and debit cards along with the lost of more then 43% of customer in TJ Maxx’s around the world. For those that don’t know, “TJ Maxx is the largest off-price apparel and home fashions retailer in both the United States and the world, with nearly 1,850 stores worldwide by the end of fiscal 2002” (history) The TJX companies were growing exponentially everyday until they made $8.8 billion in total net sales in 2006, but the next year their sales would plummet because of the data breach. After the announcement of the …show more content…
As i said before Tj Maxx used WEP security for their wireless LAN connection. All the computers, cash registers and price guns are connected to the wireless LAN. Once the hackers broke the WEP they were able to connect to the price checkers, which requires the employee to log into with their employee username and password. With the employee usernames and passwords the hackers were able to log into the computers and set up their own user accounts on the TJX system. Once in the system they copied tons of customer data. And since credit card data wasn’t encrypted even when it was being sent to the bank they would intercept the data and copy it. The hackers would even communicate with each other by sending encrypted message inside the system to let other hackers know who copied which