The breach of Home Depot's point-of-sale systems, possibly infecting each of its 2,266 retail stores, has prompted a multistate probe into the matter.
In the meantime, the home improvement store says its working to roll out support for Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) chips and pins to bolster the security of it store's transactions, doing so roughly a year before the deadline established by the payments industry.
Home Depot has assured its consumers that no debit card pins were compromised as a result of the breach, which was said to have started somewhere around April. However, the company admits that it has yet to diagram the full scope of the breach.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin said he and other attorneys general have launched a multistate investigation into Home Depot's security breach and will keep eyes on how the home improvement store manages the situation. Kilmartin has advised elevated diligence on the part of consumers who've shopped at Home Depot anytime after March 2014.
"While law enforcement and The Home Depot continue to dig into who is responsible for this breach and how many customers are impacted, the best thing for consumers is to be their own credit monitor by checking accounts daily for fraudulent or suspicious charges and report those to their financial institution immediately," said Kilmartin.
Home Depot says it began looking into the security breach on the morning of Sept. 2, just after fielding calls from banks and law enforcement agencies about evidence the home improvement store had been hacked. Frank Blake, chairman and CEO of Home Depot, has offered an apology on behalf of his company.
"We apologize for the frustration and anxiety this causes our customers, and I want to thank them for their patience and support as we work through this issue," said Blake. "We owe it to our customers to alert them that we now have enough evidence to confirm that a breach has indeed occurred. It's important to emphasize that no customers will be responsible for fraudulent charges to their accounts."
It's still too early to tell, at least from the outside of the investigation, but the Secret Service has issued several advisories on a family of malware that has been difficult to track.
Known as Backoff, the collection of malware was discovered in late 2013 and was determined to have been infecting point-of-sale systems for months without drawing any attention. In August, the Secret Service warned that Backoff was still on the attack.
Home Depot said it is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection services to any customer who used a payment card at one of its stores beginning in April.
