Data security is an important aspect of every organization that stores confidential and financial

data about customers. This is because data breach could lead to loss of money aside stealing of
data. In the case of Home depot after reading the case study, some countermeasures were not in
place before the data breach. This would have reduced the impact of the attack. Home depot did
not have in place a secure configuration of software or hardware on its POS terminal. No
evidence of a regular vulnerability check of the POS environment was found as a security
practice. There was no proper network segregation between the home depot networks and the
POS network (Bret, 2015).

Securing organization software and the network is important of which home depot is of no
exception. However, Home depot has Symantec Endpoint Protection which is an antivirus
solution, but the network threat protection feature of the security product wasn’t turned on
(Elgin, Riley, & Lawrence, 2014). Having this feature turned on would have prevented intrusion.
Besides, from previous sources on Home depot data breach, none showed the adoption of a
vulnerability management system. In support of this, if there were a vulnerability management
program in place, a periodic scan of the POS environment would have revealed a potential data
breach that would have been resolved in time (Kerbs, 2014).

References

Krebs, B. (2014, September 14). Home Depot: 56M Cards Impacted, Malware Contained.
Retrieved 5th January 2021 from krebsonsecurity.com/2014/09/home-depot-56m-cards-
impacted-malware-contained/

Elgin, B., Riley, M., & Lawrence, D. (2014, September 18). Home Depot Hacked After Months
of Security Warnings - Businessweek. Retrieved 5th January 2021 from
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-18/home-depot-hacked-wide-open

Bret, H. (2015) case study: the home depot data breach. information security reading room.
SANS institute.