The Epsilon Breach, or Hackers Have Your E-mail!!! OH NOES!

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**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

http://www.fastcompany.com/1744738/the-epsilon-breach-should-you-be-angry-worried-or-bored

The gist wrote:By now, unless you keep your money under your mattress and don't shop for groceries, electronics, or clothing, you've probably received an email from one of the following institutions, apologizing for an email breach: Brookstone, Best Buy, The College Board, Citi, Walgreens, Disney Destinations, McKinsey & Company, the Home Shopping Network, JPMorgan Chase, TiVo, Kroger, Captial One...the list goes on. (And was diligently collected by SecurityWeek.) The email will have informed you of a security breach.

The same company, Epsilon, handles email services for all the brands mentioned above, and many more. Epsilon sends something like 40 billion emails each year on behalf of its 2,500 clients. Yesterday, Epsilon said about 2% of its clients--some 50 brands--were affected by the breach.

In all srsness though, what are the thoughts on this? It's kind of annoying that big companies can't be arsed to actually protect your information. If they didn't require it, it certainly wouldn't be as big of a deal IMO. The main concern in most articles seems to be the sheer volume of e-mail addresses stolen with real names attached and the associated businesses. If someone knows Bob Taggart banks at Chase, it's probably easier to phish him than they could have otherwise. Experienced users (typically) don't fall for this sort of thing, but I hate that stuff like this leads more to people being generically frightened of technology.

**KingCracker**

I need to make my father a tinfoil hat, he is so paranoid with technology. Its ALWAYS bigbrother doing things. Infact once I watched a video on youtube at his house, and he FREAKED that I was downloading viruses

But I agree. Youd think a company that has 2500 clients that are all BIG NAME companies, could afford to actually better protect information they have on people.

**Chowderhead**

Bigger question.

Why not Gmail?

**Ketara**

KingCracker wrote:I need to make my father a tinfoil hat, he is so paranoid with technology. Its ALWAYS bigbrother doing things. Infact once I watched a video on youtube at his house, and he FREAKED that I was downloading viruses

But I agree. Youd think a company that has 2500 clients that are all BIG NAME companies, could afford to actually better protect information they have on people.

You would be surprised at how difficult that can be actually.

**Da Boss**

Yeah, there's not really any such thing as unbreachable security, just annoyingly difficult to breach security.

**ShumaGorath**

Chowderhead wrote:Bigger question.

Why not Gmail?

Why not gmail what? For being a big question it doesn't make much sense.