Home Depot has announced that in addition to the information on millions of debit cards and credit cards that were stolen by hackers in its recent data breach which had gone undetected for months before being discovered in early September, the hackers also stole the email addresses of 53 million of its customers.

So what does this mean to you and me?

It means that we can expect to receive phishing emails that appear to come from Home Depot, some of which may even be directed to us by name.  This type of precise phishing is called spear phishing and it is an effective tool of identity thieves in luring us to provide personal information or to click on links or download attachments in official looking emails.  Unfortunately, if you provide the personal information requested under some guise in the email, this information will be used to make you a victim of identity theft and if you click on the link or download attachments in the emails, you will download keystroke logging malware that will steal your personal information from your computer and use it to make you a victim of identity theft.

Home Depot also disclosed for the first time that the way their computers were hacked was by initially hacking into third party vendors with lax security and using their usernames and passwords to gain access to the computers and data of Home Depot.  This was the same tactic used in the Target hacking and many other data breaches.  In fact, in a column I wrote for USA Today in September http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/09/27/hacking-target-home-depot-credit-card/16221427/ I described the techniques used by hackers to infiltrate the computers of targeted companies through such third party vendors or others using offsite access to the computers of the targeted companies.  I mention this not to toot my own horn, but to tell you that the problem has not been solved and we will be seeing this pattern followed in future major data breaches time and time again.

TIPS

The takeaway from Home Depot’s announcement that identity thieves may have your email address is to be even more vigilant in regard to not clicking on links or downloading attachments in emails regardless of how legitimate they may look.  The risk is too great.  You can well expect that you may receive an email that appears to come from Home Depot and it may have a link for you to click on for either more information about the risk to you of the data breach or even to gain you access to free credit monitoring.  Such a legitimate email was sent by Target to its affected customers after its major data breach.  However, you cannot be sure that the email is legitimate so don’t click on the link or download any attachments.  Rather, if the message appears to you to be legitimate, merely go directly to Home Depot’s real website where you will find the real information.  When Target sent an email with a link to free credit monitoring, I ignored the email, went to the Target website and enrolled there for the free credit monitoring.