CYBERSPACE — Once upon a time, Network Solutions had a virtual choke-hold on the world of domain registration and e-commerce. Now it’s one of an assortment of providers – and it’s only contacted a tenth of the merchants whose customers lost control of their credit card information during a recent security breach that took place months ago.An estimated 573,928 individuals who made purchases on as many as 10,000 websites hosted by Network Solutions may have had their credit card information stolen between March and June. To date, a mere 4,343 of those e-commerce merchant customers have been contacted about the problem.

According to Network Solutions representative Susan Wade, the names, addresses and credit card number of customers were exposed between March 12 and June 8th of this year.

CNet.com reports that unauthorized code was discovered on e-commerce customer site servers early in June, thanks to routine maintenance. A third-party forensics team was called in to investigate and, on July 13th, ultimate crack at least some of the code, which it realized was focused on gathering credit card data.

As an email to merchant account customers explains it, card-related transactions were deliberately diverted to an unknown, out-of-system source.

Because of this, “we notified law enforcement and began the process of notifying our customers. At this point,” Wade describes, “we don’t have a reason to believe that [the data] has been used, but we are working with the credit card companies.”

The company has hired credit-card monitoring experts TransUnion to assist merchants in breaking the bad news to their hitherto trusting customers. Those affected by the security breach will receive a year of free credit-monitoring for their troubles.

Lest anyone think Network Solutions uniquely vulnerable to such an attack, its customer information site now points out that “any company operating in our business could have become a victim of this type of invasion.”

Although domain registration, email hosting and online marketing clients were not affected, Wade assures that “We really feel terribly about this.”

More information can be gained by visiting www.CareAndProtect.com.