UK Jobs Website Hacked

The news site Guardian is warning members of its UK jobs site that the site has been breached, and that personal data may been snagged.Thanks to a police request (because the incident is under investigation), according to a statement posted by the Guardian, we don't yet know how the breach occurred, or what information was stolen. Here's from the statement over the weekend: "We can confirm that we are investigating a breach of security to the guardian jobs site that we were alerted to yesterday. We have been assured by our provider that the system is now secure and we have identified and contacted everyone who may have been affected. That statement was later updated to explain that about 500,000 users were contacted." What's liable to have to have been stolen? It's probably a safe assumption that users affected by the breach had their resumes accessed, and contact information. Let's hope no log-on credentials or any credit card information was accessible.

Some will argue that it's no big deal stealing resumes and contact information. But if that's the case, why would cyber thieves engage in what the Guardian described as a "deliberate and sophisticated crime" to anonymously grab data that wouldn't be useful to them?

The only ones who can answer that is the person (or persons) involved in the attack.

There's some reason job sites are being targeted. Earlier this year, job site Monster said it was victimized for the third time in three years.

A reasonable bet is that the data being gleaned from these attacks is for scams, e-mail phishing, voice mail vishing attacks aimed at job seekers.

So, if I had my data held at that site, I'd be on the lookout for some type of targeted attack, or scam, aimed at jobseekers.

Note that this hack only affected the UK jobseekers site, and not the USA Guardian jobs site.

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