Home Depot Inc. said it had $63 million in net expenses related to its data breach last September.
During a conference call to discuss the Atlanta-based home-improvement retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings, CFO Carol Tome said expenses for the year are expected to be about $33 million after it recovers insurance payouts.
In the fourth-quarter, Home Depot recorded about $20 million in breach-related expenses but after insurance recoveries, the net hit to the company was about $5 million during the last three months of 2014.
Tome also said Home Depot is expecting “higher investments in our IT infrastructure, including people.”
CEO Craig Menear said the breach somewhat affected Home Depot’s ability to track professional business.
“Candidly, we’ve lost a little bit of visibility with the breach and changeover of cards for the pro, and our ability to track that as clearly as what we had prior to the breach, but all indications that we have, indicate that we had a very strong quarter with the pro,” he told analysts.
Home Depot said hackers gained access to the retailer’s payment system and installed malware via a stolen username and password from a third-party vendor. The breach exposed about 56 million payment cards, making it the largest retail breach of payment card information in history, according to Advisen Loss Insight.
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Chad Hemenway is Managing Editor of Advisen News. He has more than 15 years of journalist experience at a variety of online, daily, and weekly publications. He has covered P&C insurance news since 2007, and he has experience writing about all P&C lines as well as regulation and litigation. Chad won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Single Article in 2014 for his coverage of the insurance implications of traumatic brain injuries and Best News Coverage in 2013 for coverage of Superstorm Sandy. Contact Chad at 212.897.4824 or [email protected].
