whbos posted at 11:43PM Mon, 29 January 2018 - #4323300

It takes a long time for many customers to trust a company again especially since they intentionally withheld information for several years. I don't care who took over E-on. I never heard of them so why should I trust them? Their apology is a canned response and meaningless to me.

If a company has intentionally misled their customers of wrongdoing, and has not met their obligations to inform customers of any compromise which may lead to financial fraud as a result, then I would agree there is reason to be distrustful. There is no proof of that of which I am aware. E-ON took a drastic step in bringing down their website and servers with the apparent intent of uncovering the problem and investigating the extent of any possible damage. It took far longer than anyone would have liked, but they issued a rather public statement to all software owners regarding what occurred and what they did to remedy the issue. Their investigation of the issue revealed unknown suspects were acting in unlawfully entering a secured computer network for several years. E-ON say no customer financial information was compromised and I tend to believe that since they're using fairly sophisticated encryption algorithms to secure such information. While embarrassing, the issue does not appear to have been covered-up. Hiring an outside firm to investigate what occurred is no small or inexpensive undertaking, either.

Prior to ordering Vue 2016 years ago if I had known they were operating out of France I never would have ordered it. Canada is bad enough because there are some crooked companies there I've had problems with who do not supply usable product keys. I had to deal with the dysfunctional Canadian BBB to get my money back several months later. I don't even live in Canada. The company lied and said they had an office in the U. S. when they did not. If you have software product keys that suddenly don't work you can blame this Canadian company.

Did you say you didn't know E-ON was in France? Did you not do any research into the company prior to purchasing your license? Might the same thing have occurred had E-ON been an American company? It has. Computer system and network compromises occur every day and wreak havoc financially for thousands of people here in the US. From your local grocery store chain to larger, nationwide retailers, it's happened to all of them. There are three types of computer networks; those which haven't been compromised, those which have been compromised, and those which will be compromised. It's a matter of time for all of them. Most large companies do their best to stay a step ahead of it. Comparing this to your experience with whichever Canadian company is a bit apples-to-oranges, in my book.

This is just an example of not knowing who or what you're dealing with especially when a company was reputable at one time then turned crooked later. I know several examples of those. I think in E-on's case they were just negligent with protecting our information then covered it up for years.

Wouldn't it be incumbent on you to do your diligence and know something about a company's reputation prior to making large purchases from them? Do you imply that E-ON is now "crooked" because they (and, perhaps, I should say "we") have been the victim of a cyber-crime? Were they negligent? Wish I knew. It seems they took some very big steps to investigate and correct the problem once it was discovered. Is it possible they could have been the victim of ongoing criminal activity without their knowledge until now? Absolutely.

I haven't been a customer of E-ON for long. Less time than some of you, I imagine. I can give them the benefit of the doubt. Had a criminal obtained my credit card information and started buying the world with it I would have known by now. So, chances are quite good they've protected that type of information quite well.