Epic Breach of Email Lists - Epsilon Data Management

As part of modern-age business practices, large corporations will hire third-party marketing solutions to maintain large databases of customer contact information, and although most large email hosting and marketing services tout major security precautions to ensure the privacy of customer data, sometimes breaches of security occur.

Epsilon Data Management, subsidiary of Plano, Texas-based Alliance Data Systems, is a major multichannel marketing group, and calls itself "the world's largest permission-based email marketing provider", have recently admitted to a security breach which comprimised the email addresses of millions of users. While nothing more than names and email information was leaked, unfortunately a lot of people across the internet are going to have to expect a surge in spam email.

Epsilon supposedly sends out over 40 billion emails annually, and counts over 2,500 clients, 7 of which are Fortune 10 companies which allow Epsilon to host their customer databases.

According to Securityweek.com:

"Some may dismiss the type of data harvested as a minor threat, but having access to customer lists opens the opportunity for targeted phishing attacks to customers who expect communications from these brands. Being able to send a targeted phishing message to a bank customer and personally address them by name will certainly result in a much higher “hit rate” than a typical “blind” spamming campaign would yield. So having access to this information will just help phishing attacks achieve a higher success rate."

You can keep up-to-date on this breach of security with updated lists of corporations affected at SecurityWeek.com.

http://www.securityweek.com/massive-breach-epsilon-compromises-customer-lists-major-brands

Also, here are some other sources of information concerning the breach:


http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/04/04/epsilon-email-address-megaleak-hands-customers-customers-to-spammers/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/epsilon_mail_marketing_firm_exposes_millions_of_names_addresses/2011/04/04/AFEPbabC_blog.html

To setup email filtering and security services for your small to medium-sized business, please contact us at Cavu Networks to get started and prevent the hassle of being on the receiving end of spam and undesireable emails.