Once again, the largest theft of personal information has been topped with a new one. The beginning of April 2011 began with notifications going out about Epsilon which handles email marketing for thousands of companies.
A serious email breach has occurred which will impact millions of people. While reports indicate only emails and names have been stolen, the thieves stole them from a major email marketing company and are now aware of where you shop and your interests.
The threat to consumers is that this information will be used to fool, entice, and trick you. The information could be used for nothing more than a hurricane of Junk Mail in your email, or it could be used to spread malicious code to infect personal computers and handheld devices. There is also the strong possibility that the information will be used to gather even more personal data.
The term “Phishing” means the same as “Fishing” except you are the target. Knowing where you shop and your interests provides enough “bait” in the email to potentially hook people.
The Epsilon marketing firm sends out more than 40 billion emails every year, has and counts over 2,500 corporate clients, including seven of the Fortune 10. A partial list of some impacted companies are below, but this list should in no way be considered complete.
A recent data integration project bragged that, “Epsilon’s project entailed building a compiled list containing geographic and demographic data, including age, ethnicity, occupation, and income—appending more than 800 attributes. This data is sourced from more than a dozen different formats and loaded into the database after processing through Talend. “It’s a very large database,” explained Dix, “containing around 430 million records.”
To be safe, Oakland residents should be very cautious about providing personal information in an email even if it appears to be from a trusted source. Do not indiscriminately click on links, even from a trusted source. Users can hover over a link, and the full address will usually be shown in the lower left hand corner of their screen – this shows the true address of where that link will take you.
• Kroger
• TiVo
• US Bank
• JPMorgan Chase
•Capital One
• Citi
• Home Shopping Network (HSN) (added 4/3 @10:22am)
• Ameriprise Financial
• LL Bean Visa Card
• McKinsey & Company
•Ritz-Carlton Rewards
• Marriott Rewards
•New York & Company
• Brookstone
• Walgreens (Again!)
• The College Board (added 4/3 @8:20am)
• Disney Destinations
• Best Buy