How Apple Pay could make the Target and Home Depot breaches a thing of the past

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The launch of Apple’s mobile payment system could prove a turning point in the battle to secure your debit and credit card information from hackers.

Tens of millions of card numbers have been stolen in the last few months from malware-infected payment terminals in stores including Target and Home Depot. The thefts were possible in part because the card information gets stored in an unencrypted form inside the terminals.

Apple announced a system this week, one that uses a payment standard based on NFC technology. When users of its new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones walk into a store, they’ll be able to wave their phone over an NFC reader to complete a purchase.

The system, which relies in part on Apple’s Touch ID biometric technology to verify the user’s identity, could finally replace a payment technology that’s been in use for five decades.

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4 Reasons Shoppers will Shrug Off Home Depot Hack

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NEW YORK (AP) — Home Depot’s data breach could wind up being among the largest ever for a retailer, but that may not matter to its millions of customers.

The nation’s largest home-improvement chain on Monday confirmed a theft that could have gone back as far as April and affected customers who used credit and debit cards at nearly 2,200 of its U.S. and Canadian stores. While the scope of the hack is not yet known, there’s speculation that it could be the biggest yet.

Home Depot joins a growing list of retailers that have had their data stolen. Perhaps the most high-profile of those previous hacks came was at Target, which suffered profit and sales declines after shoppers fled following a breach that compromised 40 million debit and credit card accounts.

Industry watchers are betting Home Depot will fare better with its customers.

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