For today’s object lesson (and maybe abject lesson), I give you FIS Global and Guaranty Bank and Trust. I’ve written up the incident in more detail over on the Daily Dot, but the short version is a hacker (@1×0123) found a vulnerability in FIS Global’s client portal login and tweeted about it. FIS didn’t respond to him directly. Instead, they got his Twitter account locked and the screenshots removed.
Getting a hacker’s Twitter account locked. What could possibly go wrong, right?
It wasn’t just the hacker they failed to respond to. FIS also failed to respond to two inquiries by this blogger to their communications department and one attempt to reach their Twitter team.
Trying a different route, and not knowing at the time whether the vulnerability had been addressed, this blogger also reached out to contact the bank client whose data was being exposed on the Internet. They didn’t reply to two voicemails left with two different executives.
C’mon, folks. Don’t you want people to let you know if they find a vulnerability that’s exposing your customer data or proprietary information? Are you familiar with behaviorism?
If you keep ignoring people when they take time out of their lives to try to alert you to a situation, well, then the next time someone finds a vulnerability, they’ll either just keep it to themselves, exploit it, or share it with others who will exploit it. Is that what you really want? When someone notifies you, then even if you were already aware of the situation, take a damned moment to let them know you got their message and appreciated it.
At the very least, try not to tick off the hacker, okay, because it just may make a difference in their decision to publicly dump your data.
Read my report on the Daily Dot, and you can sound off in the Comments section below this post.