The Epsilon Email Breach

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.