NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

This is one of the most daft stories I’ve come across recently, but it shows the brand smashing power of  ‘nobodies’ on the internet.

gfixler, a Reddit user discovered a hack/vulnerability on the Sears e commerce web site and he was able to create an item called:

Grills to cook babies and more > Body part roaster.

So gfixler being the joker I expect he is, posted this on Reddit on 20th August.  Sears ordered a retraction, says this:

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages. It’s important for our customers to know that we have no reason to believe that any of our customer or financial data were compromised.

We’ve already taken steps to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologize to any customers who may have seen this on our site.

Post gets unreasonably deleted. All hell breaks out on Reddit and Sears get the PR disaster hey deserve!

So my take on this is:

• if you own a site that can be hacked like this, hold your hands up
• thank the hacker publicly
• fix the problem
• invite other hackers to have a go, asking them to tell the developers about any bugs on the site
• and repeat
• and get some love from unknowns who have the power to help or smash your brand online

I did a screen grab – there are 31 mentions of  ‘*uck Sears’…and so has been one of the bigger ‘memes’ online for the last day or so.

(Click on the image to see the page in high res.)

Sears PR Disaster!