blog.jobsgopublic.com

Good morning Jobseekers,

Just a quick post to let you all know that Jobsgopublic is back in action.  The DOS attack experienced yesterday meant that we were offline for Friday afternoon and evening, but our technical team of engineers worked at it over the very early hours and have got the site back up to it’s job searching best.

Again we want to reiterate that no client or candidate data was interferred with, and this was our priority at all times.

Happy jobseeking

Dear Jobsgopublic user,

We are sorry to inform you that our service is currently experiencing a suspected hostile attack from an unknown source. In the light of recent high profile data loss in this week’s news, we have disabled system access until our engineers have cleared the issue. Unfortunately this may take some time and service may not be available for the rest of the afternoon.

What does this mean?

Infected computers from around the world are opening connections to one or more of our JGP websites and are keeping them open so that genuine visitors, such as you are unable to access them.  One of our developers likened this to ‘people queuing to get on the tube but not actually getting on, just sitting there and blocking other people’s access. ‘  This I thought was a great description to understand what is happening from a non-technical angle.

Please be assured that protecting all candidate and client data is our main priority, hence we have taken these measures of protection, whilst we attempt to ’stop these people from blocking the tube’.

Our sincere apologies for this inconvenient loss of service; we are doing all we can to safely resume service as soon as possible.

Wikipedia description of Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS)

We will continue to update our candidates on activity via our Jobsgopublic Blog.

An article on the BBC website today confirmed that a Monster security breach had indeed occurred to their internal database.

Read Monster’s response on their website

We’ve previously blogged about Job Board Security in December 2007, that time the hackers had managed to access the ‘back end’ of their system.  This time it seems they managed to illegally access certain contact and account data “including Monster users IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, telephone numbers and some basic demographic data”.

The information that was accessed this time does not include their online CV and resume database.

Obviously a breach of this magnitude sends shockwaves through the online jobs board market.  We at Jobsgopublic are constantly reviewing and testing our security, but again to explicitly detail our security arrangements would be to hand our platform to the hackers.  However we would still like to advise our jobseekers to be aware of phishing emails requesting specifically your login details or any other type of information.

Participants in Noras 2008 noted that jobseekers use on average 5 recruitment sites when looking for a job, making it vitally important candidates change their passwords and amend their account details if they believe a security breach has taken place on their Monster account.

We provided some valuable links in our last blog post regarding security, however I am including them in here to ensure as an internet user, you are well informed on phishing and website security.

Email Phishing Scams
About.com phishing information
Anti-Phishing Working Group
National Consumers League (USA)
Hoax Slayer

Identity Fraud – General On-Line Security
Think You Know
Home Office
Stay Safe Online
Direct Gov Information

Articles about the January 2009 Monster Security Breach
BBC Online
ZDNet
Bloomberg.com

It’s been a while since we’ve been active on the blogging front, such a while I actually feel I need to send a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years out to all our readers.  But things are rolling hard and fast again on the Jobsgopublic front and it’s great that we are able to announce some fantastic news about two of our clients websites.

LGJobs and Kent Connection have both been shortlisted in the Best Public Sector Recruitment Website category.

LGJobs – www.lgjobs.com is the Official Local Government Website launched originally in 2001, but has undergone a significant transformation in the past 6 months and is now offering free job listings to all Councils and Local Authorities in England and Wales.  IDeA have delivered this in partnership with Jobsgopublic to provide the website platform and jobsearch functionality to Local Authorities.

Kent Connection – www.kentconnection.com Launched on 30th October, Kent Connection  includes live feeds from two of the largest employers in the Kent Region; The County Council and the Eastern and Coastal Primary Care Trust.  Kent Connection has also been designed to challenge the assumption that it is necessary to travel far from home to work, when in fact there are a wealth of job opportunities within the Kent Region.  Kent CC worked with Jobsgopublic to develop the full search functionality behind the website and includes an end to end recruitment system that will save a significant amount of time and money over their previous processes.

Both of these websites are included within the Jobsgopublic Network – this allows clients to upload a job to jobsgopublic.com and it will automatically get filtered onto up to 17 niche jobsboards on our network to massively increase the ‘eyeballs’ on job vacancies.

Winners will be announced in late March, so watch this space for updates.