Brian Krebs blogged: "Multiple banks say they are seeing evidence that Home Depot stores may be the source of a massive new batch of stolen credit and debit cards that went on sale this morning in the cybercrime underground. Home Depot says that it is working with banks and law enforcement agencies to investigate reports of suspicious activity."
He went on with: "There are signs that the perpetrators of this apparent breach may be the same group of Russian and Ukrainian hackers responsible for the data breaches at Target, Sally Beauty and P.F. Chang’s, among others." Note that this could be a bigger hack than the Target one, guess if this is another CEO who will be fired because of a data breach.
Now, is this retaliation by Russia for American sanctions? Could very well be. Tom Kellermann, chief cyber-security officer for Trend Micro, said. "Russian hackers operate within a grey area in which cybercrime is ignored as long as it occurs outside the country and the hackers are willing to conduct government-sponsored campaigns when asked." He continued with: "The regime essentially sees the underground of hacking as a national resource, as long as the hackers in Russia abide by the rules."
So Putin gets upset with the U.S. and tells some of his FSB buddies (the old KGB) to give the go-ahead to their hacker friends and cause the U.S. some trouble, tit-for-tat in retaliation for the Ukraine sanctions that the U.S. and Europe have put in place on Russia.
I would not be surprised...And now it's waiting for how the bad guys came in. I'm betting on a spear-phishing attack that compromised a workstation. But I would say that, wouldn't I?
