ALERT: More than 100,000 Monster.com Users' Personal Information Plundered

A vivid example of what can happen to your personal information when you post your resume on the Web as part of your job search strategy came to light this week.

Monster.com's job hunting sites suffered a massive security breach in which hackers stole personal data on 100,000 or more users. Apparently, the hackers somehow obtained the logins of corporate and recruiting firm users and used them to access the resume database. They then used an automated "Trojan" program to transmit the information to a rogue server, where computer security experts at Symantec found 1.6 million records belonging to job seekers.

The attack based on this data was multi-pronged: Two different kinds of e-mails were sent out to unsuspecting job candidates, one attempting to collect logins for financial sites, and the second a vicious virus that locks up data on the victim's PC, after which a ransom is demanded to unlock the data.

An article at the Fox News Site provides further details about the incident and how it happened. (It is also disappointing to learn that the job board admits to having kept the security breach under wraps for 5 days before notifying its users.)

For more information on potential dangers to watch out for in online job search, see my blog entry of August 15: "Online Job Search: Beware of Spoofing, Phishing, and Other Scams."

Posted by Laurie Smith