A Public Lesson on How to Handle a Breach
When I first heard about this, I thought to myself, “Say it isn’t so. Tell me this is just a big misunderstanding. Tell me that my favorite place to buy cables at great prices wasn’t breached.” Alas, it seems to be true. Monoprice.com had a breach.
I wasn’t too concerned since all of my credit card numbers are unique and automatically generated, and all of the e-mail addresses I use for businesses are also unique, but just the same, I checked my statement. So far, all is well.
As a security guy, I suppose I should forever relegate monoprice.com to the vendor blacklist. After all, they must have been doing something wrong to allow the bad guys to get in, right? That may indeed be the case. They may have had security so bad you could drive a truck though it. Then again, maybe it was very good.
Breaches happen. It’s very, very hard to cover every known threat, let alone the unknown. Security professionals have to anticipate and protect against all threats, while the criminal only has to find one vulnerability. Most of the time it’s not even under our direct control. We are charged with the responsibility of security and get the blame when a breach happens, but encounter fierce resistance when we tell management what really needs to be done to properly secure a site.
Unlike Gexa Energy, who took almost a year to notify affected customer of a breach, monoprice.com took the bold move of prominently and publicly placing a warning on the front page of their web site. They further went on to stop accepting orders while the breach investigation was continuing. Right now they’re trying to get back on their feet.
Preventing a breach is difficult enough, but the truer measure of an effective security program is how you respond to a breach. Do you issue carefully-crafted letters from the PR department or do you level with your customers? Do you attempt to shun responsibility or do you recognize your mistakes and learn from them?
It seems that monoprice.com recognizes its responsibility to its customers and is doing the right thing. That, combined with my personal risk-mitigation strategies, probably means I will do business with them again.