Monster.com Hacked

Hackers have breached the servers that were holding the Monster.com workforce seeking company database, retrieving sensitive user information.

According to a statement coming from the sites representatives, the people responsible for this incident have installed a server that had accessed data containing contact details of the ones seeking a job on the Internet.

The server was discovered by security employees at Monster.com, and closed, announced Monster.com.

The data exposed to the hackers, is limited to names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails. No sensitive financial information was present on the server that was breached, but the e-mail addresses and phone numbers could be used to obtain further information from the potential job seekers, pretending to be Monster.com officials.

The exact number of the people affected by this incident is not known, only a 1,6 million figure is speculated by journalists, but the company announced that it intends to contact all the people affected and inform them.

"Protecting our users from malicious activity is one of the Monster.com priorities. The opportunist attackers are using more frequently the Internet in illegal ways. This problem affects especially the high traffic web sites, that server a great deal of users at a global level", said a Monster.com spokes person.

The incident was made public, after Symantec warned Monster.com of a massive phishing operation targeting Monster.com users. Still, it now appears that Monster.com knew about this problem a month before this warning, but did not want to make it public, because it could have damaged the image of the company, also another reason for keeping this as a secret was to study how the hackers operated, and to avoid any other problems that could apear if the security hole would not have been filled completely.

Many can imagine that once noticing they have been caught many attackers will attempt to damage the system they have control over in order to cause as much problems as possible before losing control over it.

Recently it has been discovered that the same group of people has managed to breach into the security of USAjobs.gov, gathering a great deal of sensitive information.

As to now, the identity of the attackers is unknown, but it has been discovered that the attacks have been taking place from a server located in the Ukraine, a country that is known in the Internet as one not bothering too much with implementing laws against computer crime and on line fraud. The Ukrainian server was identified as a command center for a bot network that the thieves created using a Trojan virus.

Source: http://www.csamuel.org