More Hacking for Your Enjoyment (Part 1)

 

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a couple of new security hacks.

One is the celebrity hack of the Apple iCloud system, which I will discuss next time and how Apple will be bad for Staples. Along with that I will discuss the Apple hack itself and the whole privacy thing relating to images. I will say right now that that post will have a reader warning because of the content of the post. I am just preparing the readers now for what could be a possibly offensive post.

Anyway, the subject of this post is the hacking of Home Depot.

As someone who once worked at the late competitor Horny Quarters. Oops, I mean Home Quarters. I will discuss in a future post why I call it Horny Quarters, but for now on with the comparison.

Like Home Depot, Home Quarters was a home improvement store that specialized in virtually everything you need to build, remodel, and maintain a home or other structure. These types of stores carry everything from nails to lumber to appliances. Of course, if you did not know that already, you probably live in a box.

It has been reported that Home Depot was hacked back in April of this year and was not discovered until a couple of weeks ago. This means that several months had passed where this hack took place. It has just been reported up to 56 million cards could have been put at risk, which possibly makes it larger than the attack on Target last year.

As a 7 week employee of Home Quarters as a cashier, I noticed that transactions varied in size from just a couple of dollars for a person buying a hammer and nails to someone buying what seemed to be endless amounts of lumber and other assorted products that added up costing thousands of dollars at the checkout.

Cash was a rarity for form of payment, however, as well as checks both personal and business. Most of the transactions were made by credit card. The majority of the cards were business cards, but about a quartet of the transactions was made by personal credit cards.

Any way you look at it, the hacking of credit cards at a home improvement store could be a boon to anybody who successfully hacks the system. It was not uncommon to have sales in excess of nearly $50,000 in transactions after a 5 or 6 hour day. Of course a longer day would bring that number up by another few thousand dollars.

The biggest problem that I saw as a bad trend with most of the business transactions was that most people didn’t care how much they were spending and really never cared how much they were being charged for any of their items. This presents the scary situation that these same people never check their credit card statements for any possible fraudulent usage.

I believe that is this type of ignorance that creates a hack attack like this to last as long as it did. Add to this the fact that most companies don’t have antivirus software on their machines nor do they update the software on a regular basis and you have the perfect recipe for the type of disaster that has plagued Home Depot, Target and others.

Overall, the hacking will never end as long as systems go unprotected and I still believe that Staples will get hacked eventually if not sooner.

Unless of course it has happened already and they are too ignorant to realize it.