The widely
reported Home Depot data breach, where potentially customer credit and debit
card data has been compromised is being described as being potentially bigger
than the Target data breach which occurred in late 2013. Whilst these are
both US corporations the same risks exist for UK and European retailers.
Jason Hart, VP Cloud Solutions Safenet comments: ” Home Depot is the latest in a long list of data breach victims. The prevailing perception around data breaches is that they cause long term damage to an organisation’s bottom line. This isn’t necessarily case. If you look at the top breaches of the last few years in the pre-Target era, they had limited to no long-term effect on the companies’ bottom lines or stock price. You’ll see a short term blip, and then customers come back. The Target data breach had a significant financial impact on the company, but it’s still too early to estimate how it will impact customer loyalty.
“We don’t
know, at this point, what is happening at Home Depot, but this breach and the
many data breaches we have seen before are simply a symptom of an outdated
approach to securing customer data. Companies need to adopt a secure breach approach
that focuses on securing the data once intruders penetrate the perimeter
defences. This means they need to attach security directly to the data
itself using multi-factor authentication and data encryption, as well as
securely managing encryption keys. That way, if the data is stolen it is
useless to the thieves.”
Share