By now you must have heard of the Epsilon Email Breach. If you haven’t read or heard about it in the news, maybe you received an email from a company that you have an account with warning you about the breach. With the marketing company Epsilon servicing over 2500 clients, the breach affected approximately 2% of their client base, estimated at about 50 companies. The companies include such well-known names such as:
• US Bank
• Capital One
• Target
• Best Buy
• Walgreens
• Marriott Rewards
• Verizon
• Lacoste
• Home Shopping Network (HSN)
• Kroger
• And many, many more.
The hackers have mainly gotten away with names and email addresses but that leaves those customers wide open to phishing attacks (Phishing attack: the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft).
If you’re a customer that was affected by this breach make sure to keep your security software updated. If you have to open an email from one of these companies, then mouse over the link to see if the domain name matches the company. Check for HTTPS showing that the link is secure. Don't give out sensitive personal information unless you are 100% sure you are dealing directly with the company as these emails can open the way to identity theft. Remember that the majority of companies do not ask for your sensitive personal information via email.
If you’re an enterprise, whether you service clients or use a marketing agency like this to service your customers, make sure you review your own security measures. According to Fast Company, in lost sales and fees needed to fix the matter Alliance Data Systems Corp. (ADS, the company behind Epsilon) may end up paying over $100 million--about $20 per record for each of the approximately 100,000 customers at 50 ADS clients.
This breach raises additional concerns about how secure any data is within a cloud-computing infrastructure, especially as the technology becomes more mainstream. Make sure your own endpoints are safe and expect and demand the same from your providers.
SafeCentral’s WebProtection™ is a one-time install application that actually assumes that your machine is already infected with malware and ensures that the information on your computer stays secure. WebProtection™ interprets and intercepts over 5,000 discrete Windows commands and effectively blocks all potentially dangerous activities except those processes needed for the transaction. Learn more about how it actually works and how it keeps your information safe at www.SafeCentral.com.
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Epsilon Email Breach
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Protection – Free Webinar
Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) are becoming more common place as they offer enterprises costs savings however, they also pose new security risks. A Gartner report said that it expects 50,000,000 users, or 15% of corporate desktops to be deployed via VDI by 2013. For these users and their employers, VDI may offer cost savings but it makes them more vulnerable than ever to screen scrapers, key loggers, DNS redirection and malware.
As businesses strive to reduce costs associated with application and data access, many organizations are finding the solution resides in leveraging existing resources to centralize applications and services, including security. This may force enterprises to choose between poor VDI return on investment or poor security and potential lack of regulatory compliance. But what happens when data is accessed on your VDI from a local machine that is possibly infected with malware? That data is now susceptible to malware and theft.
Secure Your VDI Your Way
WebProtection™ for VDI provides data loss prevention (DLP) to ensure that the connection is secure and the endpoint data is protected when users access VDI farms. Enterprises can choose to run WebProtection’s SafeBrowser to protect browsing activity within our secure desktop or you can utilize WebProtection’s IE or Firefox browser plugins to automatically redirect certain browsing activity to the SafeBrowser allowing enterprises to ensure users are in a secure environment when accessing their VDI.
To learn more, sign up for SafeCentral’s VDI Webinar on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Protection, on Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 2:00 p.m.
Hosted by SafeCentral’s CTO Ray Dickenson. The webinar will discuss the following
• New areas of risk for your customers
• How cybercriminals are getting access to retail and wholesale banking customers' accounts
• How you can proactively stop malicious attacks
SafeCentral’s WebProtection™ is a one-time install application that actually assumes that your machine is already infected with malware and ensures that the information on your computer stays secure. WebProtection™ interprets and intercepts over 5,000 discrete Windows commands and effectively blocks all potentially dangerous activities except those processes needed for the transaction. Learn more about how it actually works and how it keeps your information safe at www.SafeCentral.com.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
SafeCentral Enters Security Challenge Video Contest
- Patented technology to block key-loggers, screen-scrapers and other malware agents, even on an already infected PC
- SecureDNS to ensure a connection to the actual site, eliminating man-in-the-middle attacks
- Automated "launch anywhere" protection for seamless integration into your existing browsing habits
