Target CEO: There Was Malware in Our Point-of-Sale Registers

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By Todd Wasserman2014-01-13 12:44:15 UTC

Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel shed more light on the data breach at his company's stores Monday morning, citing "malware installed at our [point-of-sale] registers" and vowing to make "significant changes."

"Clearly, we're accountable, and we're responsible. But we're gonna come out at the end of this a better company," Steinhafel said during an interview on CNBC. "And we're gonna make significant changes."

He added: "We are not gonna rest until we understand what happened and how that happened."

Target last week disclosed that data from as many as 110 million customers may have been compromised during two cyberattacks. In December, Target admitted that credit card details from 40 million customers were at risk. The company said last week that an internal probe revealed data like names, physical addresses, email addresses and phone numbers from 70 million customers were also at risk. Though there may be some overlap between the two incidents, the retailer said as many as 110 million customers may have been affected.

As a few security experts pointed out, the latter data may be evidence of an attack that went beyond POS. "It would appear that the attacker got to servers that had all this other information," says Alan Kessler, CEO of cloud security firm Vormetric.

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Topics: Advertising, Business, Marketing, security, Target