Folks, I am happy to announce the first guest post on ButYoureAGirl.com!
@lhgreene

Introducing Lee H. Greene. I met him on Twitter and he’s a very resourceful and helpful person. If you have questions about technology, electricity, home improvement, security or anything scientific, you should connect with Lee on Twitter

All Your Shopping Carts Belong To Us

Merchants whose ecommerce websites are hosted by Network Solutions (NS) recently received notifications from NS that NS’s servers had been hacked, with “unauthorized code” which “may have been used to transfer data . . . to servers outside the company.”

Network Solutions hosts approximately 10,000 ecommerce websites. According to the notice sent to their merchants, approximately 4,343 merchant websites were exposed to the rogue code, affecting “transactions by approximately 573,928 card holders.”

Online transactions for the affected ecommerce websites were exposed to the “unauthorized code” from March 12, 2009 through June 8, 2009.

The initial notice to each NS merchant provided a link, which the merchants could use to learn whether their ecommerce site was affected and if so, how many transactions were exposed. Those whose websites did have transactions exposed to the data security breach were informed by Network Solutions that “Under various state statutes, a retailer is to inform its U.S. customers when the security of their personal information is compromised.”

Network Solutions Offers Free Credit Monitoring.  Big Whoop

To try to soften the blow to the affected merchants, NS offered merchants the services of credit reporting bureau, TransUnion, at NS’s expense, to inform the affected customers that their credit card data had been breached and provide them with a year of free credit monitoring.

Network Solutions Sabotages Online Trust

Of course, this is an online merchant’s worst nightmare. Work hard to develop an effective online store, market it, and develop a customer base that is making purchases from the site, do everything right to build an online business – then have to tell your customers that their personal info and credit card data have been compromised as a result of their purchases from your website. Customer reactions on learning that have tended to be emphatic and unforgiving – nobody likes the idea of having their credit card info stolen, or wishes to risk that possibility again from a website that has not adequately protected their financial and personal info in the past. Ouch!

Network Solutions Failed To Protect Customers

One has to wonder – how can Network Solutions have failed to protect their servers (and merchants) from this security breach, and worse still, failed to discover it and allowed it to continue for more than three months? If you are a merchant, trying to develop and maintain a successful ecommerce website, can YOU risk having your website hosted by Network Solutions?

– Lee H. Green