Andy Greenberg reports:
Steve Hardigree hadn’t even gotten to the office yet, and his day was already a waking nightmare.
As he Googled his company’s name that morning last June, Hardigree found a growing list of headlines pointing to the 10-person marketing firm he’d founded three years earlier, Exactis, as the source of a leak of the personal records of nearly everyone in the United States. A friend in an office adjacent to the one he rented as the company’s headquarters in Palm Coast, Florida had warned him that TV news reporters were already camped outside the building with cameras. Ambulance-chasing security firms were scrambling to pitch him solutions. Law firms had rushed to assemble a class action lawsuit against his company. All because of one unsecured server. “As you can imagine,” Hardigree says, “I went into panic mode.”
Read more on Wired.