Data theft and job seekers

A story emerged earlier in the week that for the life of me I cannot explain why it's not aroused far more interest than it did.

It involves the personal details of millions of job seekers - via the recruitment website Monster.com - being stolen.

The Times claims this is the largest data theft in Britain, ever.

What's gone missing?

Names, passwords, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, birth dates, sex and ethnicity data as well as other “demographic information”, of 4.5 million people!

Why do I think it should have attracted more attention?

First, it involves a deliberate attempt to attain data and not civil servants who are (despite often crude media accounts) well meaning in their intentions, if a bit clumsy at times, like we all are.

Two, the data was stolen and not lost, i.e. data lost by civil servants may never have been found its way into the hands of people who could have used the data for a range of criminal purposes.

For more detail see Hackers steal details of 4.5 million in attack on Monster jobs site (Alexi Mostrous).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad I don't use monster then!

That's a horrific amount of data stolen, it just shows negligence that the data hasn't been protected in a more secure way.

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