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Stratfor CEO George Friedman on the Christmas day hack attack that forced the company offline.
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The website of security and intelligence analysis firm extract or back all line after being shut down.
Due to a cyber attack hack attack over the holidays.
The -- compromise thousands of credit card accounts and other personal information.
-- horse founder and CEO says that information was not encrypted.
And -- then he joins us now.
Raymond -- that you welcome.
George why wasn't it encrypted.
Basically I -- complete responsibility for that.
There was no justification.
-- there's a reason which was that we experienced rapid growth in recent years.
Our management for -- -- and managers didn't keep up with that growth.
-- -- started dropping the ball on some serious things and this was one of them.
And we feel is obviously terrible that it happened.
There's no excuse for it but that's the explanation.
There wasn't one attack was there there are actually two attacks and I I want to know the chronology of that were the customers told after the first one and how was information then in the second -- still compromise -- The -- the nations compromised in early December.
In.
-- working with the FBI.
They had an ongoing criminal investigation and if we notified all of our customers.
Than the hackers would've known that we were on to them well before they announced it.
Instead the FBI went to the credit card companies.
And told them the numbers show the accounts that had been compromised.
Keeping our name out of it so it wouldn't get back to the hackers.
So in fact the customers credit cards have been notified through the credit card companies.
In early December.
And -- announcements which we expected and we knew was going to come came in December at the time they did something more than.
Still -- credit cards.
The -- destroyed our servers and and that's -- something that really was not in keeping with things they've done before.
Because what they tried to do was actually silence us.
They attacked our servers they -- her back ups and it was their understanding that we would never be able to publish again.
Where so from our point of view there were kind of two things going on.
One -- the really serious issue of the credit cards which are actually handled.
Weeks before they announced it.
In one way.
The question of the security of our customers' identities we hired an identity protection firm to take care that.
But the real question here is is this a new pattern among the hackers that they're gonna -- the people they they don't want to publish -- user technical.
That's BI -- -- charges.
-- they're going to be criminal charges.
I think and they criminal charges against individual well the FBI is investigating and they don't investigate things that don't about criminal charges.
So once they find the people involved I think there will be and have declined -- with -- -- Well again to distinguish we don't have clients were not a consultancy.
We have subscribers and the USA today -- is usually -- futures -- and they stayed -- -- -- with us overwhelmingly and if you take a look at Twitter.
The positive statements that they maker just overwhelming Georgia is great to see you thank you for -- -- and explaining at George Freeman strapped for the answer is really some story.
