Compromised hosted applications and side effects

Biggest threat in compromised Hosted application is, It never stops with one incident, never stops with one customer. Usual trick is whole system level compromise. Effect of compromised hosted application will be huge, in the beginning it may not be potentially high. email address mining is a way of collections huge list of email IDs, so that it can be sold to spammers or product marketers.

It is hard to believe that big email marketing provider like AWeber has been compromised. As per their official blog only customer email list has been compromised. A threat of this form can not happen as  a standalone event triggered by couple of multiparty application problem. It must be coupled with customer access details as well. It is a usual practice in most of the hosted application providers to store list pertain to  a customer with authenticated place against customers credentials.

What AWeber should do,

1. Explain and write to customer who’s emailing lists are compromised. As of now it looks from outside all customers mailing lists are compromised
2. Engage in the community and work with other email providers to find out, from where customers are receiving spams. Track down the defaulters
3. A compromised list if spreads over, This will be  a big disaster in customer confidence and social rapo
4. Work on strategies to engage with customers write to them on Social engineering, A popular way to track down customers.

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