NEW YORK (Standard&Poor's) Sept. 3, 2014--Standard&Poor's Ratings Services understands that Atlanta-based home improvement retailer Home Depot Inc. is looking into "unusual activity" that possibly relates to a data breach on customer credit and debit payment cards. At the time of this release, the company has not determined that cardholder data was stolen nor is there evidence of any misuse of the data. We have recently seen several instances of payment-related data breach at other retailers we rate. In most of these situations, the costs companies incur with such data breaches end up being manageable and have not had a material impact on credit protection measures. Given the size of Home Depot's profits and cash flows as
