Network Solutions Drops The Ball

By Marc Handelman on July 29th, 2009

Netsol

News, via the inimitable Robert McMillan (IDG), of the astonishing lack of systems oversight at Network Solutions - the firm, entrusted for years by both the Federal Government as well as licensing bodies (ICANN anyone?) - with the registration of billions of domain names, has revealed security flaws, and subsequent data loss, in their management of credit card information and other personally identifiable information. This time, to the tune of over 500,000 individual transactions! The company is privately owned by General Atlantic an equity firm providing capital support for growth companies (apparently Network Solutions needs a bit more security support guys). More information, including a short snippet of the original story, appears after the jump. Was it an inside job? Read it and weep…

From ComputerWorld and IDG’s Robert McMillan: “Network Solutions warns merchants after hack“

IDG News Service – “Criminals may have stolen more than half a million credit card numbers from merchant servers hosted by Networks Solutions, the Internet hosting company warned Friday. In a letter sent to merchants who use its Ecommerce Hosting services, the company said that someone illegally installed software on company servers used handle credit card transactions initiated by 573,928 people between March 12 and June 8, 2009…”

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Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules (tech.slashdot.org)
LexisNexis, Its Data and Fraud (arnoldit.com)
Web Services Provider’s Accounts Hacked (comsecllc.blogspot.com)
Over Half Million Debit and Credit Card Files Exposed (lockergnome.com)

Categories: Data Loss, Data Security, Database Security
Tags: Data Breach, Data Loss, Data Theft, Domain name, Features, Network Solutions

One Response to “Network Solutions Drops The Ball”

shashib
Jul 29th, 2009 at 19:17

Hi Marc, we are currently working with law enforcement and do not want to speculate who might be behind this grave situation. As a Network Solutions employee I want to assure that we take security very seriously and this is an unfortunate event but we are staying focused on what’s best for our merchants and their customers at this crucial time. I hope you will see how we have been providing around the clock support and real-time assistance to all our e-commerce customers at http://www.careandprotect.com.

Thanks,

Shashi