Malicious users steal data on 4.5M British job-seekers

With the theft of confidential resume information from the UK's version of Monster.com, Great Britain has now undergone its biggest data theft in history, according to The Times of London.

The data on job seekers stolen by hackers from Monster.co.uk included names, passwords, phone numbers, birth dates, and ethnicity, for example, the Web site admitted earlier this week. Registrations on the job site have soared with the rising layoffs of the economic downturn. In an earlier large data breach in the UK, the British government lost the details on 25 million child-benefit recipients in 2007.