Data breaches are a constant worry for most organizations. Recently, the ecommerce provider, Shopify, had a close encounter of the uncomfortable kind with their potential data breach. This interesting news came to us from eWeek in their article, “How Shopify Avoided a Data Breach, Thanks to a Bug Bounty.”

Breaches occur way too frequently for anyone’s comfort, but what is often never reported is the breaches that aren’t successful due to organizations taking quick and proactive measures. Thanks to a bug bounty program and the support of its vendor partner Google, Shopify was able to avoid a potential disaster that could have enabled an attacker to take over Shopify’s Kubernetes cluster.

Shopify built a self-serve platform where organizations can literally go in and press the create cloud runtime button and in minutes have web applications serving traffic running on Kubernetes. The Shopify system uses guardrails to warn organizations if they’re doing something that Shopify thinks might not be best practice or might not be secure.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.