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It's 3 a.m. - Do You Know Where Your Customer Data Is?
Tal Nathan | June 26, 2012
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As email marketers we are always looking to move faster and choose more nimble solutions to help us do our job. Despite this predilection for improving our output with speed and technology, we sometimes forget that we are the owners of one of the most valuable assets a company has - the customer data file.
The LinkedIn security breach that occurred earlier this month is just the latest reminder of the value of customer data and the extent hackers will go to get it. In this situation, hackers were able to obtain 6.5 million passwords out of the 160 million possible for LinkedIn's entire user base. Data breaches seem to be coming at greater frequency - especially for companies with lots of rich customer data - but LinkedIn is catching more heat than most for its lax data security. In fact, a disgruntled user has just filed a $5 million lawsuit (likely to soon be a class-action suit) that claims the company's password security policies didn't adhere to standard encryption practices that make passwords hard to decipher should they be accessed by an unauthorized third party.
The lawsuit isn't just another blow to the company's reputation, this attack against its security practices and leadership has cast doubt on one of the most popular social networks on the Internet. If this isn't keeping LinkedIn executives up at night, it should be. Once users begin worrying about the security of a website, a slowdown in traffic is almost inevitable. And for a company that makes money off of ads and services delivered to members when they're spending time on their site, this is a big deal.
Read the entire StrongMail article
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