Hackers Stealing Data from Monster.com Phish Users of USJobs

Hackers stole personal information of nearly 146,000 candidates using a job Website of the US government when they broke into the computer systems at Monster Worldwide Inc., a government spokesperson said on August 30, 2007. Reuters.com published this on August 30, 2007.

There are approximately two million users for the USAjobs.gov Website. The theft on it was the result of a hacking attempt apparently out of the Ukraine, according to what Monster said in the third week of August 2007, said Peter Graves, a spokesperson for the US OPM or Office of Personnel Management. Reuters.com published this in news on August 30, 2007.

In the middle of August this year, attackers compromised accounts of Monster.com to get to the resume database of the company. They used a Trojan horse to target users of Monster.com and got away with the names, telephone numbers, mailing addresses, and mailing ids of 146,000 users.

Response team of Symantec at Texas determined that hackers craftily tricked innocent computer users into downloading malware onto their systems so that the criminals could compromise their PCs. With this, they planned to launch phishing attacks on the job hunters whose data they had fraudulently accumulated.

Phishing schemes are particularly damaging in comparison to other scams because by using the Internet, cyber criminals can access innumerable targets in a short time while easily dodging justice.

It was only on August 29, 2007 when Monster informed the US government jobs agency about the large amount of data theft from the USAjobs.gov site, Graves said. Reuters.com reported this.

Equipped with the information, the OPM is now in the advanced stages of cautioning all two million USAjobs.gov visitors to be watchful for phishing scams trying to make e-mails look more legitimate by using the stolen data.

Graves said in a statement that the initial attacks occurred in July 2007 and the organization came to know about them when a user of USA Jobs reported a complaint to it. Washingtonpost.com published the statement on August 30, 2007.

The USAjobs.gov Website was taken offline on August 29, 2007 as additional precaution for users' protection.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 9/13/2007