ICT309: You are Required to Analyze the “Home Depot Data Breach Case Study”: Information Security Management Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

Assessment Description:

Case Study Report

You are required to analyze the “Home Depot Data Breach Case Study” (Uploaded under Module 7) and write a research report that should cover the following tasks:

Task 1: Analyze the case study and identify the techniques used by the attacker to cause the data breach.

Task 2: Critically evaluate the case study and discuss what security procedures were missing, which leveraged the attacker to exploit the vulnerabilities.

Task 3: Assess the Home Depot situation against the risk of a security breach. Identify and discuss the technological weaknesses that resulted in a breach of data.

Task 4: By considering the technical weaknesses (task 3), recommend the best security practices to prevent the data breaches in the retail industry.

Task 5: Analyze and suggest suitable mitigation techniques specifically to the Home Depot to protect against the same type of data breach.

Task 6: Identify and recommend new security technologies that can allow the Home Depot to upgrade their existing payment card systems.

Case Study: The Home Depot Data Breach

The theft of payment card information has become a common issue in today’s society. Even after the lessons learned from the Target data breach, Home Depot’s Point of Sale systems were compromised by similar exploitation methods. The use of stolen third-party vendor credentials and RAM scraping malware was instrumental in the success of both data breaches. Home Depot has taken multiple steps to recover from its data breach, one of them is to enable the use of EMV Chip-and-PIN payment cards.