It has been all over the TV news and reported by bloggers and news sites. The hacking onto Home Depot is potentially much bigger, more widespread, and most costly to the merchant, to the credit card companies, to banks (and to their insurance companies) than the Target break-in 8 months ago. This is a major crime event.

If you haven’t become familiar with the incident, this story in ComputerWorld is a good, detailed overview of what seems to have happened: Data shows Home Depot breach could be largest ever.

This is a cautionary tale for all marketers. If a corporate giant is not able to protect its computer systems, small business marketers and individual marketers, unless they are especially vigilant, are even more vulnerable.

It may be of some consolation to online marketers that the Home Depot theft took place, primarily, at physical brick-and-mortar stores. But that consolation is an illusion; it occurred, not by someone walking into a store and tampering with a credit card reader, but through getting access to a server in a data center and causing the software to be downloaded into the store’s Point of Sale terminals (i.e., electronic cash registers.)

This is the same process that would be used to break into a website and stead credit card information or secretly downloading malware onto the computer of a person who visits the site.

So beware, and tighten your security as much as possible. As John Donne wrote, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

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