On January 17 2007, TJX Companies Inc. announced it had
experienced an unauthorized intrusion into its computer
system. Initially the company claimed the security breach
occurred from May 2006 to January 2007, but latter it
conceded it was likely that the hacking began in July 2005. It is
believed that more than 100 million records were stolen. A
month before the breach was discovered, information stolen
was used in an 8 million gift card scam. The breach was due to
the outdated wireless security encryption scheme. The hackers
were able to sniff and access the streaming data from a rental
house next to a TJX store