Monster.com said it will impose a mandatory password change for all North American and Western European users of its employment website by the end of this week. The decision to put this policy in place followed an online notice last Friday disclosing that Monster's customer databases had been hacked for the second time in six months.

Monster spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said hackers swiped user IDs, passwords, e-mail addresses, names, phone numbers, birth dates, ethnicity and state of residence for an undisclosed number of job seekers and employers. It's only the latest in several recent big hack attacks. Last week, Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that hackers broke into the system it uses to process 100 million payment card transactions a month.

"Data is king," says Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy at security firm Lumension. "We will continue to see an uptick in targeted attacks in 2009."

For more on Monster.com's hack attacks:
- check out this USAToday.com article

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