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For the second time in as many weeks, a company storing a large volume of personal data has been hit by a major theft. This time the target was leading employment Web site Monster.com, which hosts millions of resumes. The news followed the annoucement last week of a breach at Heartland Payment Systems. The company reported on Friday that hackers apparently accessed its customer database. They illegally accessed and stole an unspecified number of Monster.com user IDs and passwords, names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.The hackers may have used a modus operandi similar to the one used against Heartland, observers said. The Monster.com hackers didn't get credit card information, but the stolen information could be used to abet a credit card scam. For instance, in 2007, antivirus software giant Symantec described an automated and malicious Trojan-horse program that it dubbed Infostealer.Monstres. The bug was used to hack into Monster.com employer accounts and cross-reference that data to some 1.6 million Monster.com users. Monster's wholly-owned subsidiary, Monster Government Solutions, provides solutions for federal, state and local governments as well as the education sector. Some of the sites Monster Government Solutions hosts include USAjobs and military.com. More than 6,000 government agencies and educational institutions use Monster Government Solutions.Security experts now contend that with Monster.com getting hit twice in less than two years and Heartland being gaffled (or ripped off), the biggest infraction here could be apathy among certain enterprises."It's not the lack of capability, it's the lack of will," said Phil Lieberman, president of security application and service company Lieberman Software. "Monster is a typical example of a gen-y company striving for comfort instead of a business advantage through security."Lieberman noted that this incident was the first time that Monster.com had publicly announced such a theft. A previous data theft at Monster.com was disclosed by the British media. He recommended that Monster.com implement compartmentalization of its critical and not-so-critical information assets."This is gross incompetence, and what I would ask is, who were the auditors and security consultants working with Monster? That's a problem, too," he said. "There's no money in the cure but there's plenty of money in the treatment, and even though it generates revenue and billable hours, it doesn't solve the problem. This is clearly what happened here."For its part, Monster.com has sent notices to their users indicating that their databases were illegally accessed. However, the company didn't reveal how and why the breach may have occurred or how many records were stolen. Experts say the Heartland and Monster.com breaches are just the beginning of a trend.
For its part, Monster.com has sent notices to their users indicating that their databases were illegally accessed.
