MySpace HQ shutdown due to insider breach

While the usual cause of a data breach at a social-networking site is down to an outsider hacking into the database, last week’s breach at my favourite site MySpace was attributed to an employee who gathered the names, social security numbers and other personal information on a number of his co-workers. The employee in question was detected and fired, but the discovery of the data breach led to a shutdown of MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters all day Thursday, as employees were told to work from home. An email was sent out to all employees asking them to work away from the office on their laptops while the company was “analyzing their systems to reduce the possibility of any future breaches”. There were no reports of a data breach of MySpace user information. The last big data breach at MySpace was in June of last year, when a flawed security setting allowed Yahoo! users to simply type in the web address of private profiles and gain access to private pictures. The private photos of celebrities including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan were exposed in this security flaw, which questioned how secure data portability between sites such as Yahoo! and MySpace really is.