Hardware giant Home Depot has shelled out $43m in its efforts to put out the fire resulting from the breach this year.

The payout covered damages from the theft of 56 million payment cards and 53 million email addresses.

Those expenses covered the cost of hiring expensive forensics teams, call center operators to field angry customer inquiries, and free credit monitoring for victims.

The SEC filing stated that: "Expenses include costs to investigate the data breach; provide identity protection services, including credit monitoring, to impacted customers; increase call center staffing; and pay legal and other professional services, all of which were expensed as incurred.”

$15m of the $43m was expected to be paid out from its Data Breach insurance.

Home Depot said in the filing: "It's probable that the payment card networks will make claims against the company. The ultimate amount of these claims will likely include amounts for incremental counterfeit fraud losses and non-ordinary course operating expenses (such as card re-issuance costs) that the payment card networks assert they, or their issuing banks, have incurred."

The attackers managed to remain hidden for 5 months, only being active during business hours.