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News just in from security reporter Brian Krebs: Fortune 500 real estate insurance giant First American exposed approximately 885 million sensitive records because of a bug in its website. Krebs reported that the company’s website was storing and leaking bank account numbers, statements, mortgage and tax records, and Social Security numbers and driving license images in an enumerable format — so anyone who knew a valid web address for a document simply had to change the address by one digit to view other documents, he said. There was no authentication required — such as a password or other checks — to prevent access to other documents. According to Krebs’ report, the earliest document was labeled “000000075” — with newer documents increasing in numerical order, he said. The data goes back at least to 2003, said Krebs. “Many of the exposed files are records of wire transactions with bank account numbers and other information from home or property buyers and sellers,” wrote Krebs. First American is one of the largest real estate title insurance giants in the U.S., earning $5.8 billion in revenue in 2018. A spokesperson for First American did not immediately respond to a request for comment but told Krebs that its web application was shut down and that there would be “no further comment” until its review was complete. It’s the latest breach of sensitive mortgage data in recent months. TechCrunch exclusively reported in January a trove of more than 24 million financial and banking documents were left inadvertently exposed on a public cloud storage server for anyone to access. The data contained loan and mortgage agreements, repayment schedules and other highly sensitive financial and tax documents that reveal an intimate insight into a person’s financial life. Millions of bank loan and mortgage documents have leaked online ... Read More
Julian Shapiro Contributor Share on Twitter Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributor How do you hire a great growth marketer? How do startups actually get their content marketing to work? Every company’s online acquisition strategy is out in the open. If you know where to look. This post shows you exactly where to look, and how to reverse engineer their growth tactics. Why is this important? Competitive analysis de-risks your own growth experiments: You find the best growth ideas to adopt and the worst ones to avoid. First, a warning: Your goal is not to repurpose another company’s hard work. That makes you a thief. Your goal is to identify other companies who face the same growth challenges as you, then to study their approaches for solutions to draw from. As I walk through uncovering a competitor’s tactics, keep in mind which competitors are worth looking at: For instance, you should rarely over-analyze early-stage companies. They’re unlikely to be methodical at growth. Meaning, if you blindly copy their site and their ads, it’s possible you’ll be copying tactics that are not actually responsible for their growth. Their success may instead be from network effects or other hidden factors. Instead, it’s safest to get inspiration from companies who’ve sustained high growth rates for a long time, and who face the same growth challenges as you. They’re likely to have sophisticated growth operations worth studying deeply. Examples include: Pinterest Airbnb Amazon Facebook Uber If these aren’t your direct competitors, don’t worry. You don’t need to audit a direct competitor’s tactics to get incredibly valuable insights. You can look past direct competitors. You’ll gain useful insights from auditing the user acquisition funnel of any company who has a similar audience and business model. Examples of audiences: Wealthy consumers Enterprise businesses Middle-class adults who use Chrome Dog owners And so on Audiences matter because their behaviors and needs differ wildly. Each requires its own growth strategy. You want to audit a company whose audiences is similar to yours. You also want to ensure the company shares your business model. Examples include: A high-touch sales process with multiple phone calls A consumer ecommerce site with easy checkout A self-serve SaaS signup with a freemium plan A pay-to-play mobile game And so on Each model may necessitate different ads, landing pages, automated emails, and sales collateral. The process Never implement another company’s tactics blindly. There’s an effective process for growth analysis, and it looks like this: Source potential growth ideas. Prioritize them. A/B test them. Measure if an A/B variant significantly outperformed its baseline and whether the cost of implementing the winner would be worthwhile. Only then should you implement it. An example Here’s a brief example before we dive into tactics. Let’s pretend we’re a SaaS company offering consumer banking tools, and that we’re struggling to get users to onboard our app. Our hypothesis is that visitors are bouncing because they don’t trust us with their sensitive information. Our first step is to define both our audience and our business model: Audience: Tech-savvy, adult consumers. Business model: SaaS freemium funnel. Our next step is to look for companies who share those two aspects. (We can find them on Crunchbase.) Once we have a few in hand, we look for how they handle customers’ sensitive information throughout their funnel. Specifically, we audit their: Ads Content marketing / SEO Landing pages A/B tests Signup flow Automated (“drip”) emails It’s time to learn how we audit all that. I’ll share how our marketer training program teaches marketers to do this on the job. Tactic #1: How to see a company’s A/B tests ... Read More
Facebook plans to launch its cryptocurrency by the first quarter of next year, reports BBC News. The company is expected to reveal more details about the currency this summer, before testing begins later in 2019. The currency, which is being referred to internally as “GlobalCoin,” will reportedly be available in around a dozen countries at launch, where it’s expected to offer people affordable and secure payments without the need for a bank account. The currency will need to overcome numerous technical and regulatory hurdles before it can be launched. According to BBC News, last month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with the Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney to discuss the opportunities and risks of the planned digital currency.... Continue reading… ... Read More
Microsoft is working on a new design of its Surface Pro, expected to debut later this year. While the Surface Pro design hasn’t largely changed since the Surface Pro 4, Microsoft is expected to trim the display bezels, add a USB-C port, and make the next Surface Pro design a little more rounded like the Surface Go. We’ve seen a patent that hints at a thinner Surface keyboard, and now one has appeared that shows a Surface Pro with a USB-C port and a new Type Cover model. Spotted by Windows United, the new patent details how Microsoft plans to use magnets to prevent the Surface Type Cover from flapping around when it’s not in use. You currently fold the keyboard under the device to use it as a tablet, and it’s held in place simply by how... Continue reading… ... Read More
Efforts to adapt games to TV and film have generally been poorly received -- but the cultural and business climate we're in may be perfect for Sony's new venture... Read More
Contested trademark is thought by fans to be a possible title for the next Elder Scrolls game... Read More
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