A federal judge in Atlanta has dismissed shareholder derivative litigation against The Home Depot stemming from a massive data breach in 2014, finding that the company’s top executives and board of directors took steps to address data security weaknesses, even if the steps they took in hindsight proved to be inadequate.
U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas Thrash dismissed the 15-month-old suit Wednesday. He also wrote that the stockholders who sued had failed to identify any false or misleading information about the adequacy of the company’s data security in Home Depot’s 2014 and 2015 proxy statements. The suit named as defendants Home Depot’s current and previous CEO and board chairman, its executive vice president and chief information officer, and a number of current and former members of the Atlanta-based home improvement chain’s board of directors.
