Zappos Breach: 8 Lessons Learned

8 Lessons Learned

By Mathew Schwartz

January 17, 2012

I decided to choose the article about the Zappos Breach. It was called “Zappos Breach: 8 Lessons Learned.” In the article Mathew Schwartz (journalist) discussed 8 “immediate lessons” that businesses should know in case of a security breach. For those of you sitting at the computer thinking WHAT IS Zappos, don’t feel bad, I had no idea either. Zappos is an online shoe and clothing shop that is owned by Amazon.com. It is based out of Henderson, Nevada and on January 17, 2012 it was hacked by online con artists.

I thought the article was very interesting; I had no idea of this breach and how it happened. The 8 lessons were; Advance Planning Mitigates Breach Fallout, Create a response plan in advance, Issue a clear, timely warning, Secure stored credit card data, notify customers in multiple ways, think of non-U.S. customers, Tap external sites if necessary and Pick the right breach support channels. These 8 topics each went into sub detail about how Zappos handled it well, or how they could of handled it better. Then went on to discuss how you could help yourself if this happened. It was like in class when we talked about hacking then made the phone call. It is so easy to do and no one would have noticed unless you actually know what you are looking for. 

Thanks to this article I now know there is a law requiring safety with Credit Cards, which makes me feel better about using it online. It also taught me to be much more careful with my card online. I thought, from the information provided that Zappos did a good job handling this problem and emergency. They were calm and immediately notified their customers of the breach so they could hurry and change all passwords.  If I was a Zappos Customer I would have been happy with the handling of this issue.