Has Play.com Been Breached?
We wrote a while back about the problems Lush was facing when it came to security, and how more than anything, its reputation will have been hit hardest after the hack attack on its sites. Though, sadly, there’s not much you can do when people decide to try and break your online boundaries, you can always make sure during the web development stage that your defences are as tight as possible at all times.
But no matter how large or secure you think your site is when internet marketing, there’s likely to always be someone around who’ll take a chance to the chagrin of everybody else. Play.com has found that out to their peril today, when they confirmed that customer details in the form of names and email addresses may have been stolen.
But it shows that, although your on-site security may be as tight as it can possibly be, you still need to compensate for external problems depending on your size. Play.com uses an external company for their marketing, which is where the breach took place. Did that external company have tight security, and did Play.com investigate to find out the strength of its security?
Luckily, it could have been much worse. Apparently no credit card details have been farmed, only names and email addresses. But still, we can’t imagine that many of their 7 million registered customers will be too happy at all…
"Our database is maintained on a secure internal server that is not connected to the internet," says a statement from Play.com. But you can understand customers’ concerns, and they have every right to ask questions if they feel their private data has been compromised in any way shape or form.
As happened with Lush previously, the way Play.com handles the episode will be crucial to their reputation and generating customer confidence.
