Aoife Carr reports that Gardai are investigating a security breach involving the recruitment website RecruitIreland.com:
It is thought that names and e-mail addresses of those registered with the site were accessed for spamming purposes. The site was shut down yesterday afternoon when the breach was noticed….. CVs, usernames and passwords are not thought to have been compromised.
Read more on Irish Times.
In related coverage, RTÉ reports that 400,000 e-mails have been affected by the security breach.
A notice posted on RecruitIreland.com dated February 8 says:
We have taken the website offline as a result of a data breach; we are doing everything necessary to have the website back up and running as soon as possible, please bear with us.
As per our security guidelines and structures, we have a process in place for eventualities such as this; when we were notified we shut down the server and the database to prevent any access.
The present indicators are that our database was breached to get email addresses and names for spamming. We shut down access to the site and database at 2pm and immediately informed the Data Protection Commissioner and the Gardai. We take this incident and any attempted breach of our database extremely seriously and this is being investigated internally by our own people, externally by Brian Honan who is a security expert and by Gardai.
From our investigations to date no other data, including CVs, usernames or passwords have been compromised. However if you wish you may change your username and password when we are back up and running.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and assure you we have a professional team working hard to get this resolved.
Please come back to this webpage as investigations progress and we get new information to hand.