BOSTON >> Home Depot has reached a $17.5 million settlement with the attorney generals of 46 states and the District of Columbia over a 2014 data breach that exposed the payment card information of some 40 million customers.

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office detailed the settlement in a statement today, saying Home Depot agreed under its terms to employ a full-time chief information security officer among other measures.

Cybercriminals hacked into Home Depot’s self-checkout point-of-sale systems using a third-party vendor’s username and password and installed malware that harvested the customer data from April through September 2014.