‘Any day now we should be up and running again.’ That’s the message we’ve been hearing from BAREIS MLS since it went down last week. Just as a refresher, BAREIS stands for Bay Area Real Estate Information Services, and they contract our MLS through Rappatoni which has been hacked in an extortion attempt. The latest from BAREIS was a statement Thursday evening that they are close to an interim solution. I call it MLS light. The message they sent out was a little confusing. On the one hand they stated that “Rappatoni has restored our MLS database,” and that we would have access to it in the coming days. On the other hand, they also stated, “You will have access to the MLS system with limited functionality.”
I could be totally off here, but reading between the lines as a database administrator prior to becoming a Realtor in 2004, it sounds more like they have accessed the data, and not the actual database. The whole business about limited functionality sounds to me like they are rebuilding the database. Maybe it’s a backup database they had, or at least should have had? Or it could have been a previous version of the database they resurrected? Attending an office meeting at Coldwell Banker on Thursday it struck me that they might need to build the database from scratch, this time eliminating the vulnerabilities that enabled the attack for Ransom.
What is really going on? I don’t think that we are getting the whole story, which gives us leeway to make up our own. In the office meeting a ransom number of $600 million was bandied about, but it was acknowledged that number could be low. I’ve been out of the database business for a long time now, but I’m pretty sure they can rebuild the MLS for considerably less. The question becomes how long with that take to (re)create a truly secure database? Yesterday morning BAREIS MLS gave us an update that they would have a timeline for us by the afternoon. In the afternoon they said Rappatoni is not committing to any solid timelines, although they do say they are in the ‘testing phase’ of getting the (or more likely the facsimile of a) system back.
If Rappatoni did or does pay the ransom, who do you think they are going to pass that cost along to? It’s going to be the customers, which are all the brokers and the Realtors below them. That’s not something we can pass along to our clients. It’s a cost we the little guys will be stuck paying, if indeed it gets paid. There is talk about contracting with another MLS system instead of Rappatoni. Maybe we move on from them entirely, but the issue will be retrieving the data. Who owns the rights to it? What exactly is in the contract between BAREIS MLS and Rappatoni? I have lots of questions and no answers.
If nothing else, I can safely say this is the greatest debacle of my professional career, and I’m no stranger to debacles. As Realtors, we specialize in debacle management. Debacles happen, and we learn to make the best of the situations that come up. We have some workarounds, but they are pretty inefficient. We no longer have the one stop shop that Rappatoni provided. Ultimately we will make the best of the situation, because that’s what we do.