Target's Credit Card Data Analysis

During Thanksgiving of 2013, Target had 40 million of its costumer’s credit card data stolen. Hackers remotely installed malware into Target’s security and payments system, which monitored the use of credit cards throughout all 1,797 of Target’s U.S. stores. This data was then stored on a Target server, which the hackers had taken over.
During 2014, Home depot had the credit card information of 56 million customers stolen, and the email addresses of 53 million customers. Though the data stolen did not contain the passwords of the emails, they had other ways of trying to get the passwords. One of these ways was phishing, and they did this by sending emails to the recovered email accounts, to see if they would put in their information. The hackers
initially got into the Home Depot system, by using information that they stole from a third-party vendor, just like the previous hack on Target. Apparently, this did not fully get them into Home Depot’s network, so they resorted to using a bug in the Windows operating system to get in. Once they were in, they targeted the self-checkout machines, due to the ability to identify them more easily them regular registers. This breach was confirmed, when the credit card information of the users appeared on a website called rescator.cm, which also happens to be the website where all the Target information was found.