Home Depot confirms its payment systems were breached
Heads up, Home Depot shoppers: pay very close attention to your bank and credit card statements if you've made a pitstop there over the past few months. After a frenzied burst of investigation, the company confirmed earlier reports of a payment information breach that may have affected home improvement types in the United States and Canada as far back as April. Alas, there's still no word on just how many people may have been affected by the hack, but there's just the faintest silver lining here: there's no evidence that your debit card PIN has been compromised, and folks who bought from HomeDepot.com are in the clear. That's all thanks to the nature of the breach: security researcher Brian Krebs added last night that the culprit used a variant of the very same malware responsible for the huge Target data breach that potentially affected millions of customers over the holidays. That means only in-store point-of-sales systems running Windows were at risk, though that's not going to make many people feel any better about all this.
