Page 12 - Writing Campaign Book

tion rather than dealing with things in-house and walking right into legal issues. But, what I do not like is the late response time. The discovery was made on March 25th and the users of the app were not alerted until 4 days later. Coming from a PR perspective, I believe the company should have alerted their users of the breach much earlier than they did.
This situation is very similar to a very recent data breach, which included money this time. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was recently discovered that Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor department stores’ payment systems were hacked. The hacker man- aged to hack up to ve million credit card and debit card numbers used in many locations in North America. But, what makes this similar to Under Armour’s situation is the lack of securing information from hackers. It was discovered that the hacker had credit card infor- mation from as early as May 2017, which is almost a year ago. The difference between the Under Armour case and the Saks case is that the hacker of the credit cards was identi ed. According to SC Magazine, the hacker is identi ed as “JokerStash,” a website that hacks credit card data and sales it online for those that want to purchase things with hacked cards. That makes the PR side of things much harder for the Saks case because the com- pany is dealing with people’s money. Under Armour just had to contend with account information, not account holder’s credit or debit information.
Personally, I believe that Under Armour did a good job of alerting the users of the MyFit- nessPal of the data breach. That move may have saved the company a lot of heartache and headaches later on. Things could have gotten much worse. But, because they decid- ed to alert the users and require them to change their passwords, I believe that it helped to prevent a large amount of damage. I also like how they released a press release on the website to alert the general public about the situation. This would have also been good
for those that may not use the app frequently enough to notice a message in the app. Yes, stock lowered a little bit because of the announcement. But, if things would have gotten worse, that could have been detrimental to the app’s users and the Under Armour brand itself. What I do not like is the late alert. The breach was announced four days after the dis- covery. That leaves much more time for error. You never know what could have happened between that 4-day gap. Like I stated previously, I would have alerted the customers of something just in case things would have really gotten worse. That way, they could help protect themselves from any further breach.
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