Throughout 2007 and before, several major job search website databases have been ransacked by identity thieves, and people who sell personal information for money. In September of 2007 alone, the information of over 150,000 people has been accessed by “wrongdoers” in some way or another.
Even some of the largest and most official sites have been subject to these raids, and job seekers are beginning to learn that the threat of lost personal information is real, and that they must be very careful regarding the information that they include in their profiles and in their resumes when they are posting for prospective employers.
And these days, it isn’t just thieves who are reaching in and grabbing what they can find. In another large case, a heist engineered by Infostealer Monstres used a Trojan horse to use legitimate log-on information and passwords to steal further identity information from the databases of an enormous, reputable online job search company. The Trojan took names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of 1.3 million people. At that time, no Social Security numbers had been stolen, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have been had the circumstances been different.
Quality job search websites work very hard to implement long-term privacy protection strategies. However, it is also up to the site users themselves to protect themselves in the case of fraud. Make sure that you never divulge financial information on a resume or in a profile. Remember that a reputable employer will never request this information of you. Nor will they request physical description attributes or common security passwords that are used by financial institutions, such as your mother’s maiden name.
Remember, no matter how good the privacy policy of a certain job search website, if an attack such as the Infostealer Monstres’ Trojan breaks into a website, the website may be unable to stop the harvesting of information that you have provided to that website. So minimizing the amount of personal information that you do provide, so that there is less to steal. This is, in fact, an important strategy for all of your online activities, as it is not just job search sites that will have this kind of a raid of private information.