A server belonging to a recruitment company that was a customer of Monster.com and others was left unprotected causing the exposure of personal details from resumes to CVs from job seekers.
Monster.com was aware of the data breach since August, however, this did not led them to notify potential victims on the exposure, asserting that this was the responsibility of the recruitment company that “owned” the data.
“Customers that purchase access to Monster’s data – candidate resumes and CVs – become the owners of the data and are responsible for maintaining its security”, Monster Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) Michael Jones said in a statement cited by TechCrunch. “Because customers are the owners of this data, they are solely responsible for notifications to affected parties in the event of a breach of a customer’s database.”
Jones also mentioned that they notified the recruitment company after they were aware of the data breach, which was soon secured. “In today’s era of growing privacy regulations, how companies react in the wake of a data breach is critical”, said Peter Goldstein, CTO and co-founder of Valimail.
Indeed, “Monster might have paid careful attention to their internal security practices, but still the data that they are responsible for has been exposed,” said Pankaj Parekh, chief product and strategy officer at SecurityFirst. “This is obviously not an acceptable excuse to those whose private information was exposed.”
While “Monster shrugs its sloppyg shoulders”, European regulators might not be so easy-going about the data leak, Lucy Security CEO Colin Bastable said. “Of course, Monster’s Ts and Cs – terms and conditions – may leave them without liability. Let’s see how the EU treats this.”
Information that were leaked consists of phone number, work history, home addresses, as well as email addresses included on resumes that were submitted from 2014 to 2017.
“The exposed resumes give cybercriminals more than enough data to commit phishing attacks and effective impersonation attempts, which can lead to account takeover, identity theft and other scams,” said Goldstein. “And the fact that criminals know these individuals are on the job hunt means their social engineering attacks can be highly tailored and therefore all the more convincing to their victims.”
He asserted that “Monster may not have been required to notify regulators in this specific situation,” but an organization’s “best practices (and in some cases GDPR regulations) dictate that companies notify the customers impacted by a breach.”
Users are continuously to receive the worst end of a bargain and Bastable suggests maybe it’s time to change the data-sharing model. “Why would anyone trust any business with their data when it is being pimped out like this?” said Bastable. “At least give people a slice of the action when you sell their data.”
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2. Train Your Employees.
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3. Enforce Password Law.
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Every organizations (from large to small businesses) can become a victim of cybercrime. Technical controls combined with employee trainings are an effective way to prevent risking your systems to cyber attacks.
Source: SCMagazine