George V. Hulme writes: Earlier this month more than 50 companies were involved in a massive heist of names and email addresses from Epsilon Interactive. With millions of customers of companies such as Best Buy, Brookestone, Dell, Marriott and many others affected, the question is being raised: are so many breach notifications from so many…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
The Epsilon Hack Attack: Time For “SOX For Consumers”?
Matt Pauker of Voltage Security discusses the Epsilon breach and where we go from here. He writes, in part: What about requiring every third-party service provider to protect personal customer data through encryption, tokenization or another advanced security technology, through clauses written into and enforced as part of standard service level agreements? This is something…
Epsilon a Victim of Spear-Phishing Attack, Says Report (update/correction)
Jaikumar Vijayan follows up on the news story by iTnews, mentioned earlier today, which reported that the Epsilon attack was a spear-phishing attack that resulted in the downloading of malware. Jai makes a point of noting, however, that there’s no proof or confirmation yet from Epsilon that this was a spear-phishing attack. As I commented earlier today,…
Epsilon breach used four-month-old attack
Brett Winterford writes: … Today iTnews can reveal that Epsilon has been aware of the vulnerability behind this attack for some months. In late November, Epsilon partner ReturnPath – which provides monitoring and authentication services to email service providers – warned customers about a series of coordinated phishing and hacking attacks levelled at the mailing…
Have you gotten a phishing phone call after the Epsilon breach? (updated)
I received the following email from a blog reader this morning: FYI I have received 3 phishing emails in the last 12 hours including emails purportedly from Charter, Walgreens, and Citibank; of special interest however is the fact that I received a phone call on my home phone and the ID listed the caller as…
Why unsubscribing from mail lists might not have protected you from the Epsilon breach
Back in December 2010, when Walgreens sent out its first breach notifications, one of the troubling aspects was that despite the fact that consumers had unsubscribed from their mailings, their data had been retained. The December 2010 notification email read, in part: We realize you previously unsubscribed from promotional emails from Walgreens, and that will continue….