Guardian Loses 500 000 CVs

It’s been widely report this week that the Guardian jobs website was hacked resulting in 500 000 CVs being stolen. Although no logon or financial information was exposed, the breach is still considered serious as a typical CV contains plenty of information that can be used for identity theft. Similar information has previously been stolen from the likes of Monster.

Although the security breach was embarrassing and the theft illegal the actual data loss is perhaps less serious than it first appears. Much of the information found in a CV is often available legally in the public domain. Public profiles of business networks such as Linkedin are a good example as are the usual suspects such as Facebook for social networks. Most countries now have online phone books that can provide address and phone number details. Personal blogs and websites often complete the picture.

It wouldn’t be out of the question to develop an information crawler to farm personal information from public web sites and services. Granted that stealing CVs would provide a higher quality of data but it also comes with the risks of severe punishment if caught.

Legal methods of harvesting even more personal information are already in circulation. For example the Porn Star Name game that circulated on Twitter recently.

So although we should be concerned about crimes against our personal information, we should also pay attention as to what we give away for free.