October 26, 2009 by Matt Thomas
The Guardian newspaper emailed around half a million of its users this weekend to alert them to the fact that the Guardian Jobs website site was subjected to what they have called ‘a sophisticated and deliberate attack’. The Jobs arm of the guardian boasts about 10 million new unique users per year, many of whom upload personal information and CVs, so any hack is a very serious breach indeed. However, the Guardian claim to have stopped ‘the hack was stopped before it was completed’.
A Guardian spokesperson went on to claim that, “As soon as we were alerted to the fact that there was a problem, we dealt with it, in line with the information commissioner’s guidance on data protection.”
Although the hack was dealt with early, efforts to stop it were apparently hampered by the fact that the breach happened late on a Saturday afternoon when no one official was in the guardian offices. The Guardian is, at present, unable to give any technical details of the hack though have confirmed that the metropolitan police’s E-crime unit is looking into the case.
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