The last day of this work week proved to be anything but a relief for Monster Worldwide employees, who had to deal with yet another security breach, a stinging article in BusinessWeek, and technical issues that caused their main site to crash for several hours.
First, The Register reported that security researchers found a bevvy of FTP passwords, some from high profile sites, on an open cybercrime server. The trojan is harvesting FTP login data of major corporations, including Monster.com. The logins are believed to have been stolen during the last two weeks and some are thought to still be valid.
The Register said the breach opens the door for hackers to upload drive-by download scripts and other malware onto compromised sites.
This is the second time this year that the job board has faced a security threat. Back in January, Monster reported their database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data.
After news of the breach went public on Friday, Monster.com crashed. Whether the two incidents were related is not known, but one can’t help but speculate since a reason for the crash was not given.
Monster’s Twitter account reported the crash and also spent a good chunk of time tweeting reassurances to frustrated job seekers and recruiters. Later that afternoon, the site was reportedly up and running again.
If this bit of news wasn’t enough, Monster employees awoke Friday morning to a critical article in BusinessWeek entitled, “Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble,” that describes how Monster is falling out of favor with both recruiters and job seekers who are turning to social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter for their recruiting/job search strategies.
While this notion is nothing new to anyone familiar with the recruiting industry, it is one of the first articles from a major publication that speculates about the downfall of the job board and pulls quotes from a roster of industry experts and recruiters to make a compelling case for the inevitable.
BusinessWeek even enlisted CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson to take a jab at Monster, even though CareerBuilder’s core product is essentially the same (and Ferguson seems to take every chance he can get to bash his biggest rival in the media).
In the article Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi ticks off a number of projects the job board has planned to stay ahead (or abreast) of the times, including rolling out new contextual search technology, improving customer service, and slashing prices for some of their top customers. He even hints that some game-changing acquisitions are in the not-so-distant future.
“We are not done,” he tells the reporter in a statement seemingly intended for the job board’s outspoken critics. Oddly enough, it almost sounds defeatist. But if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that Monster isn’t afraid to take risks, especially when it comes to acquisitions and global market expansion. Perhaps all the naysayers and security threats will spark big changes in the job board’s business model that could keep them relevant for years to come.
UPDATE: Kathy O’Reilly, Monster’s Senior Manager, Media Relations, emailed this response to Cheezhead:
The Register, a British technology news and opinion website, recently published an article reporting a security vendor, Jacques Erasmus of Prevx, had located a server in China that stored FTP login credentials for a number of major companies, including Monster. These credentials were apparently stolen from PC’s that had been infected with a computer virus.
Monster’s incident response process was activated immediately. Monster’s IT Security Team has investigated this report and believes there is no security impact, and no compromise of Monster’s systems. In addition to reviewing internal security logs, Monster spoke to Mr. Erasmus, and determined that the pair of credentials he recovered are not valid and are related to accounts that were closed in excess of 18 months ago as part of a security review. Monster will stay in touch with Mr. Erasmus and continue to monitor the situation.
Finally, the security issue explained above is completely unrelated to the site outage which occurred on Friday morning. Friday’s outage was caused by a technical issue which was identified and quickly corrected.
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June 29th, 2009 at 10:13 am
All you need to know about Monster is where they get their sales people from. They’ll hire any ex CareerBuilder person, Hot Jobs or they love
KIA and Dodge guys. They’ve always been about the resumes, their game is beyond tired. The ad agencies, who also love a good KIA sales person are in bed with them, so when the “special” commission goes away to push Monster, let’s see how the Shakers and TMP’s of the world survive. I can’t wait till Monster lays off the recent hires they made, it’s going to be tough when those reps go back to their Chrysler dealer and realize their old job selling Mini Vans is gone.
June 29th, 2009 at 11:14 am
90% of online articles, blogs and social media are complete noise. I’m starting to realize they add almost zero value to my life as a whole and will make concerted efforts to massively scale back their usage in the future so I can get on to more productive activities. Swatting flies and watching the grass grow would be a vastly productive start. The article was really a rehash of dozens of others we’ve seen. It would only be a ‘dark day’ for them if someone read the article (which basically states monster has lots of competitors and will probably see more – shocker) and makes the assumption they will be out of business in short time. Reality check – not going to happen.
June 29th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I undestand Cheezhead hates Monster…but this really is not news. Regardless of who you are a fan of. Sometimes this site really does have decent stories…yet sometimes you guys just try to create something out of nothing.
June 29th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Funny Bruzzy, CB has always been known to have the worst sales people, not Da Monsta.