FYI

[June]

I haven't seen this posted yet. I received the following from NOSSCR:

Those of you who have applications for ALJ positions pending with the Office of Personnel Management should check the website www.usajobs.gov. There has been illegal accessing of the database maintained by Monster, which is the technology provider.

According to Mary Volz-Peacock, Program Director for USAJOBS, the accessed information does not include sensitive data such as Social Security numbers of job applicants.

Information about the situation and about the need to change passwords can be found at www.usajobs.gov.

[privateatty]

Yeah, go to www.usajobs.gov. Cute. Looks like OPM needs to get their OGC on this, pronto.

[zero]

Excellent opportunity to justify the copyright CLE in Hawaii for an OGC attorney at OPM.

www.usajobs.opm.gov/ is the real site for people who, like me, fell for the hoax.

[barkley]

Here is the message:

Attention USAJOBS® Users
As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, our technology provider (Monster), often is the target of illegal attempts to access and extract information from its database. We recently learned that the Monster database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data. The information accessed does not include resumes. The accessed information does not include - sensitive data such as social security numbers or personal financial data.
As a further precaution, we want to remind you that an email address could be used to target "phishing" emails. USAJOBS® will never send an unsolicited email asking you to confirm your username and password, nor will Monster ask you to download any software, "tool" or "access agreement" in order to use your USAJOBS® account.

In order to help assure the security of your information, you may soon be required to change your USAJOBS® password upon logging onto the site. Please follow the instructions on the site. We would also recommend you proactively change your password yourself as an added precaution. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, but feel it is important that you take these preventative measures.

We continue to devote significant resources to ensure USAJOBS® (Monster) has security controls in place to protect our infrastructure and stakeholder’s information. We hope that these efforts are helpful, and continue to allow users to defend themselves against similar attacks.

Mary Volz-Peacock
Program Director
USAJOBS®

[privateatty]

So Monster can expropriate a .gov site? Is it really a hoax? If it is, I fell for it too.

[lurker]

Jan 29, 2009 12:45:42 GMT -5 privateatty said:

So Monster can expropriate a .gov site? Is it really a hoax? If it is, I fell for it too.

No - the gov't contracted with monster.com a while back for the usajobs site - the problem is that someone hacked monster.com, including the usajobs portion.