Matthew Humphries covers a Silverpop-related deviantART e-mail address hack mentioned previously on this blog:
Pre-Christmas 2010 will be remembered as the time when well-known online brands and websites started to fall to hackers. The biggest of them all so far has been Gawker, and we’ve also seen McDonalds have its databases compromised this week. But that’s not the end of the security breaches.
Today deviantART, the largest online community of artists, has announced its user database has also been compromised. The fallout being up to 13 million user e-mail addresses, usernames, and birth dates being exposed and likely used by spammers.
The breach occurred through Silverpop System Inc. It’s a marketing company deviantART uses to communicate with its users through a mailing list, but now seems to be a weak point in securing user data. The company is assuming the data was stolen by spammers.
The only saving grace is passwords were not taken, so if you have a deviantART account it has not been compromised. What it will likely result in is a lot more spam e-mails being directed to those 13 million accounts.
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