Home Depot may have earned the dubious distinction of being responsible for the biggest compromise ever involving credit and debit card data.
Security blogger Brian Krebs, whoreported the data breach Tuesday, updated his report yesterday with new information gathered from the cyber underground. According to Krebs, the data strongly suggests that a breach occurred at nearly all of Home Depot’s 2,200 stores in the U.S.
Krebs based his conclusion on a review of stolen credit and debit card data posted on an online store that sells such information. The site lists each card, along with the city, state and ZIP code of the card owner, as well as the store code where the data was stolen.
Several companies have reported data breaches in recent days, including grocery chain Supervalu, UPS Stores Inc. and Dairy Queen.
The breaches have highlighted escalating concerns over a point of sale (PoS) system malware tool dubbed “Backoff” that was used in the massive data heists at Target and others like Neiman Marcus and P.F. Chang’s.
According to federal law enforcement authorities, Backoff has infected PoS systems at around 1,000 retailers. Security firm Kaspersky Labs, which conducted its own research of the malware, believes the number could be much higher.
