Cyber criminals responsible for attack on Target have reportedly used stolen credentials from one of the Us retailer’s vendors

Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said: "We can confirm that the ongoing forensic investigation has indicated that the intruder stole a vendor’s credentials which were used to access our system."

However, the information on how the credentials were stolen or which specific portal was used by hackers was not revealed.

Last week, the US retailer cracked down on access to two of its systems including a human resources website called eHR and a database for suppliers called Info Retriever soon it came to know about the attack.

Security researchers at US-based cyber intelligence firm, IntelCrawler, revealed that the malware responsible for the data breach in which the data of over 70 million customers had been reportedly stolen from Target had been written in Russian.

Upon experiencing data breach, the US retailer is considering investing $5m in cyber security awareness to teach citizens on cybersecurity and the risks of phishing scams.