first published week of: 11/10/2014
I've been following the huge Home Depot credit card hack since news broke, and now it turns out the breach involved email addresses, too - 53 million of them.
Click here to read up on Home Depot happenings.
For those who need a refresher, on September 1, a big new batch of credit cards poured onto black market websites where thieves buy and sell stolen cards. These underground websites are like the Amazon of stolen credit cards.
By the next day, security experts began linking the newly listed cards to Home Depot. Several banks believe the breach began in April or May of this year, and it looks like all 2,200 Home Depot stores are affected, meaning the breach is potentially one of the biggest retail hacks to date.
That notion has just been confirmed. Home Depot has come out and said that 53 million email addresses and data on 56 million payment cards were stolen, making it a larger breach than previously thought. That's about 13 million more victims than the Target breach that rocked the company earlier this year.
Has your card been compromised? Click here to learn what steps you need to take to make sure you're protected.