Irish Job Portal Hacked

According to the news reported on March 31, 2008 by Hackinthebox, the chief officials of Jobs.ie, an online job agency, revealed that on March 27, 2008, CVs of the applicants submitted to their agency were downloaded through a non-Irish Web address.

Moreover, due to this security breach, Eamon Ryan, Minister for Communications, recently launched a campaign known as "makeITsecure" to fight against hacking. The hacker by posing himself as a legitimate company can use the stolen information to gather further financial and personal information from the victim.

The criminal has illegally obtained the login ID and password of the employer registered with the agency to access the job applications area of the Website. The hacker has downloaded the personal information from the submitted CVs and especially from the CVs of the people who are not looking for job at present.

Jobs.ie has contacted the affected people and informed them about the hacking and warned them to be cautious about the inbound e-mails which they can receive in coming days to ensure the Internet security.

The Data Protection Commissioner has been informed about the incident by the company. But the company will inform the police authorities only after identifying the country to which the hacker's web address belongs.

Job.ie's Huw Taylor has sent an e-mail to all the affected people informing about the "security breach" on March 27, 2008, as reported by Ireland on March 31, 2008.

In the e-mail sent by the company to the affected people, it informed the clients about the hacking and that they have identified and immediately stopped it. They apologized to their clients for the trouble caused due to the security breach and assured them that steps are being taken to prevent this type of incident in future.

The company warned the clients to not to give any personal information like bank account number, phone numbers or passwords to anyone until he finds that the established contact is legitimate. Jobs.ie advised the affected people to not to open any suspicious e-mail attachments such as .exe files.

Related article: IRS Cautions Taxpayers of Recent Email Scam

» SPAMfighter News - 4/4/2008