· News · 1 min read
Hot Topic’s 57 Million Record Lesson
Hot Topic just handed hackers a 730 GB database with nearly 57 million customer records. Names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, purchase history, birth dates, partial credit cards — the works.
The asking price on the hacker forum? $20,000.
That’s about $0.00035 per record. Your customer’s entire profile — less than a penny.
The lesson here isn’t complicated: if you’re storing it, someone’s trying to steal it. And if you don’t know exactly where that data lives, you’re just waiting for your turn.