This past Thursday, March 10th California based security company that specializes in DDoS prevention/protection known Staminus Communications Inc was hacked, had its web site taken down for a period of 20 hours and the data base holding the accounts of customer credit card were leaked to the public.
The web site has since been back online on and off for periods of time but nearly 4 days later, at the time of this article, the web site remains inaccessible to the public. In a statement on Friday March 11, Staminus CEO was quoted as saying “Around 5am PST today, a rare event cascaded across multiple routers in a system wide event, making our backbone unavailable. Our technicians quickly began working to identify the problem. We understand and share your frustration. We currently have all hands on deck working to restore service but have no ETA for full recovery.” Staminus has since declined all media’s attempts for further comments on the matter.
As for the Hackers, these individuals reportedly gave an interview with authors of an e-zine indicating that they “seized control over most or all of Staminus’s Internet routers and reset the devices to their factory settings.” They also go on to accuse Staminus Inc of “using one root password for all the boxes and of storing customer credit card data in plain text, which is violation of payment card industry standards.” To prove it, the hackers leaked the credit card information of Staminus customers found on the companies servers. Even the owner of the company is said to have been locked out of the entire web site for the time of the attack.
Over the course of the weekend Staminus has come under heavy criticism from their own customers and the rest of the tech world. Although Staminus has declined comment on the matter, this has not stopped customers from lashing out lettings their feelings be know over the companies Facebook and Twitter accounts -which were not targeted during the attack.
A comprehensive hack on a company dedicated on selling internet protections is obviously a devastating blow, add to that a mismanaged public relations campaign in the immediate aftermath seems to have the company reeling. The worst part for Staminus is that they get hacked and they are in trouble for it. If the company is indeed found to have been storing credit card information in violation of the industry standards, the company may soon have to answer for this in court.
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