Beware The Monster
It seems like there are so many data breaches these days that the news of such events is more or less brushed aside. The public is becoming de-sensitized and just says “oh, another one of *those* new stories”. Recently, it was discovered that Monster.com, the popular job-hunting web site, was the victim of a breach into their systems which compromised an estimated 1.3 million accounts. Monster.com has issued this notice, which was also emailed out to registered members, and they have allegedly increased monitoring and security on their servers.
The controversy is not over though. Information continues to trickle out, such as the Monster.com résumé database being used to pharm out malware, or the fact that 146,000 accounts on USAJOBS, the U.S. Government’s job search web site were also affected. Monster.com does seem to be acting to fix things. However, the fact that it took them 5 days to acknowledge and announce the data breach in the first place, or that they seem to either be relying on user apathy regarding data breaches or affected by apathy themselves is disconcerting.