Monster.com took 5 days to disclose data theft

By Jim Finkle

BOSTON (Reuters) - Monster.com waited five days to tell its users about a security breach that resulted in the theft of confidential information from some 1.3 million job seekers, a company executive told Reuters on Thursday.

Hackers broke into the U.S. online recruitment site's password-protected resume library using credentials that Monster Worldwide Inc said were stolen from its clients, in one of the biggest Internet security breaches in recent memory.

They launched the attack using two servers at a Web-hosting company in Ukraine and a group of personal computers that the hackers controlled after infecting them with a malicious software program known as Infostealer.Monstres, said Patrick Manzo, vice president of compliance and fraud prevention for Monster, in a phone interview.

The company first learned of the problem on August 17, when investigators with Internet security company Symantec Corp told Monster it was under attack, Manzo said.

"In terms of figuring out what the issue was, that was a relatively quick process," he said. "The other issue is you want to make sure exactly what you are dealing with."

His security team spent the weekend investigating, located the rogue servers, and got the Web-hosting company to shut them down some time either late in the evening on August 20, or early in the morning of August 21, he said.

Manzo said that based on Monster's review, the information stolen was limited to names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, and no other details including bank account numbers were uploaded.

On August 21, Symantec published a report on its Web site that said it had found copies of scam e-mails that the engineers of the attack were using, with the aim of getting information that was more valuable than just the names and contact details of Monster.com users.