Report: Secret Service Now Investigating Home Depot Breach – Consumerist

Nothing scares big-box shoppers and retailers quite like the specter of another nationwide credit-card data breach. Home improvement chain Home Depot has announced that it is investigating a possible data breach of the payment systems in its 2,200 stores, and the blog Krebs on Security analyzed data found in a shady corner of the Internet to show that this is likely what happened. Now Reuters reports that the Secret Service is involved in the matter.

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A law enforcement source told the wire service Reuters that Home Depot has now contacted the Secret Service, and is also working with private security firms to determine whether there has been a breach at all.

Report: Secret Service Now Investigating Home Depot Breach – Consumerist 

See also: U.S. Finds ‘Backoff’ Hacker Tool Is Widespread

More than 1,000 American businesses have been affected by the cyberattack that hit the in-store cash register systems at Target, Supervalu and most recently UPS Stores, the Department of Homeland Security said in an advisory released on Friday.

The attacks were much more pervasive than previously reported, the advisory said, and hackers were pilfering the data of millions of payment cards from American consumers without companies knowing about it. The breadth of the breaches, once considered limited to a handful of businesses, underscored the vulnerability of payment systems widely used by retail stores across the country.

On July 31, Homeland Security, along with the Secret Service, the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center and their partners in the security industry, warned companies to check their in-store cash register systems for a malware package that security experts called Backoff after a word that appeared in its code. Until that point, Backoff malware and variations of it were undetectable by antivirus products.