Recent headlines about Monster security breach is way overblown.


The last thing Monster needs right now is more bad press. After the announcement of job cuts and a disappointing quarter, the new leadership team needs some time to focus on getting the team to be accountable and executives investing on their technology.

Each and every day tens of thousands of recruiters go to Monster and look at resumes of the 70M plus resumes and profiles stored in the monster resume database. These profiles store people’s home addresses, emails and phone numbers. All of these recruiters have full access to users’ profiles and regularly dump these profiles into their email systems or talent acquisition engines.

Very few people searching for a new career would enter their credit card into a job board site, and in the majority of these cases, when a job seeker is buying salary surveys, this is done via partners’ sites, not monsters sites. My guess is this would be less than .05%.

There are also a number of companies that spider these sites on a regular basis and use these lists for spam. Where else can you get 70 million home addresses with phone numbers, job titles and in some cases salary expectations (or estimate of household income)? Monster and the other large job boards are very aware of this and monitor it closely.

So what is the issue in this case? I assume someone pretending that they were from a monster email address sent emails to the monster profiles, suggesting they come back and update their profile and perhaps add a credit card - for whatever reason. Who would be dumb enough to do this? And let me ask you … how many of these spams do you get on a regular basis from banks that you may or may not deal with, or even from ebay?

Consumers need to think before they give their credit card information out at any time. Although anyone who did give their credit card to Monster on this scam may have been compromised, their credit card company, in most cases, will reverse the charges. More importantly, they should take the time to learn how to surf the Internet safely.

So why don’t we all stop blaming Monster - as this can happen to anyone - and get over it?