Newsroom

September 10, 2014

Home Depot breach prompts investigation, lawsuit

The massive data security breach at Home Depot has prompted Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to request a Federal Trade Commission investigation. Reuters also reported that an Illinois consumer has sued the company.

Markey and Blumenthal said in a statement, "If Home Depot failed to adequately protect customer information, it denied customers the protection that they rightly expect when a business collects such information. Such conduct is potentially unfair and deceptive, and therefore could violate the FTC Act."

KrebsOnSecurity said this week that financial institutions are seeing a "steep increase" in PIN debit card fraud after the retailer breach even though Home Depot said there was no evidence of PIN fraud. The New York Times cited a person briefed on the investigation as saying the Home Depot breach could affect more than 60 million cardholders - compared to 40 million affected by the massive Target breach last year.

NAFCU continues to press for legislative action to set national data security and breach notification standards for retailers. The association is also a member of the Payments Security Task Force, a diverse group of participants in the payments industry focused on EMV chip implementation, including ways to help reduce testing and implementation time.