Target CEO quits over data breach

US retail giant Target announced on Monday that chief executive officer (CEO) Gregg Steinhafel was stepping down, nearly five months after hackers stole data on potentially more than 100 million customers. Steinhafel, chief executive since 2008, will resign immediately as CEO and chairman of the board. Chief financial officer John Mulligan has been appointed interim CEO, the company said. In December Target, the third-largest US retailer in 2012 with total sales of $73.3 billion, disclosed that hackers successfully infiltrated the company’s information systems, obtaining credit card data for some 40 million customers. In January the company revealed that the hackers stole an additional trove of data with personal information such as home and email addresses for up to 70 million customers. The data breach, one of the biggest in retail history, hit sales during the critical holiday shopping period and spurred congressional hearings on the vulnerability of customer information in an era of increasingly sophisticated hacking efforts. Sales fell 6.6 per cent across the company’s nearly 1,800 stores in the United States in the fiscal fourth quarter, covering the three months to February 1, 2014, hurt by both the data loss and heavy discounting during the holiday season. Sales fell 0.9% for the full year, according to AFP.