At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
You might expect the US Government to be on the ball when it comes to security. Expectations are often not met, as has been the case with the official Federal Government employment site it seems.
Obama is the Google Government man and seemingly on top
of all things tech. I
wonder what he will make of the lack of data security at one Federal
Government website?
The United States Office of Personnel
Management has been acting more like the UK Government in terms of data
security, or rather the lack of it, or so it would appear.
USAJOBS is the official one-stop-shop for
Federal Government jobs and employment information in the United
States. It has also been officially breached.
In a statement released over the weekend, Mary Volz-Peacock, Program
Director at USAJOBS admits that it had been the subject of a security
breach. Or rather the company providing the job seeker technology,
Monster, had been.
"We recently learned that the Monster database was illegally accessed
and certain contact and account data were taken" she explains. The
stolen data includes "user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names,
phone numbers, and some basic demographic data."
Volz-Peacock was keen to stress that no resume or social security data was stolen, and no personal financial information either.
However, she did point out that the data could be used as the basis for
phishing activity and reminds users that USAJOBS never sends
unsolicited email asking for login confirmation nor offering software
downloads and security tools.
You might have thought that Monster would have learned a thing or two
since falling victim to a similar data loss 18 months ago. Back then a
data harvesting bot managed to login to Monster.com and grab user
information.
In August 2007 Monster.com the company said that the breach had
impacted at least 1.3 million users. There are no figures available for
the current situation, which is understood to apply to Monster.com as
well as USAJOBS.
Patrick Manzo, the Global Chief Privacy Officer at Monster Worldwide,
says "Immediately upon learning about this, Monster initiated an
investigation and took corrective steps. It is important to know the
company continually monitors for any illicit use of information in our
database, and so far, we have not detected the misuse of this
information."
Michelle Thomas
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