Google Bot Pounds Verus

Verus is an online bill-paying company that had a huge database of their clients. They have been recently forced out of business because of information that leaked and which anyone could find via Google.

Verus was working together with a lot of hospitals in order to facilitate bill-paying. A lot of data about hospital patients was stored on Verus servers. That was not anything of concern initially as this is standard procedure. Also, they have not been hacked or anything like that, but one of their computer experts had mistaken something while implementing a firewall, fact that caused it to leave a hole in the fence, thus allowing Google to index that part of the site. While using the simplest search, you could find the patient in their database and also get a hold of personal information such as full names, addresses and Social Security numbers, according to NetworkWorld.

Verus has been in this business for a long time now, for more than 10 years, to be precise; however, after this incident, they stopped their services because they lost their customers' trust. So, a minor security error can have such terrible consequences. It's one thing to get hacked and data to get stolen, but this is simply offering information for free. The time between the firewall's misconfiguration and the disclosure of the data leakage was more than a month - that's for how much time the company had been exposing their clients' info. Even if they already patched up their security system, nobody wanted to use their services anymore, so they ran out of business.

In my opinion, it's not clients who should be more careful when picking such services; the ones that offer them should pay more attention to their security modules. Since Verus was in this business for so long, everyone would have thought them to be efficient and secure, but as you can see, one minor error can cause such an unpleasant incident. All online bill-paying companies should learn something out of this, I think.