Class Action Lawsuit Filed Over Home Depot Customer Data Breach
Home Depot faces a class action lawsuit after it admitted to having suffered a massive data breach, with hackers stealing credit card information from tens of millions of customers.
The complaint was filed by Kelsey O’Brien in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on September 9.
The Home Depot class action presents claims against the company for negligence, alleging it failed to adequately protect customers’ data and that it failed to have in place reasonable protective measures.
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Learn MoreWhile Home Depot has not released many details on the data breach, some experts have said that the breach is likely larger than the one that hit Target late last year, involving the theft of at least 40 million credit and debit card numbers and 70 million other pieces of data gleaned from Target customers.
Stolen Info Already On Hacker Sites
While Home Depot has said that the hackers did not obtain customers’ PIN numbers, the stolen credit card information has already appeared on websites known to traffic in stolen consumer information, the lawsuit claims.
The class action seeks to cover all customers impacted by the data breach and calls for compensatory damages, punitive damages, and credit card monitoring services for three years.
The hackers allegedly used a variant of the same malware that breached Target’s systems last year, which some say means Home Depot and all other major commercial companies should have been prepared to thwart.
In a message posted on its website to customers, Home Depot apologized for the incident and said it will offer free identity protection services and credit monitoring to any customer who has shopped at Home Depot since April 2014.
The attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa and New York have said they will begin an investigation into the data breach and the company’s efforts to defend consumer data. At least two U.S. Senators have also called for an investigation.
Photo Courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr
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billMarch 26, 2015 at 1:14 am
Hello yall need to take better care of our info and our accounts the resan i am saying this is because i just recently found out by my bank that i was hacked as well. And I would like to know what ya'll are going to do about this because i like shopping at your stores but if i cant trust ya'll's system on protecting us from credit card hackers and so forth and i would hate for ya'll to lose custim[Show More]Hello yall need to take better care of our info and our accounts the resan i am saying this is because i just recently found out by my bank that i was hacked as well. And I would like to know what ya'll are going to do about this because i like shopping at your stores but if i cant trust ya'll's system on protecting us from credit card hackers and so forth and i would hate for ya'll to lose custimer's from this but ya'll have got to fix this. and getting everyone free protection is fine and dandy. But i want alittle bit more then just something like that because im starting not to trust useing my debit card/checking account at yalls store anymore.