The Unavoidable

Ever notice that little fine print at the end of whatever service you are signing up for?  It usually has some baloney about being secure, you having a right to privacy, and the that they may/may not share your information with a 3rd party.  At the end of the day no one *really* halts the registration process because they are worried about who might be getting their data.  While this isn't a huge concern or worry....it becomes a nightmare when you start to find that the 3rd party one company refers to is the same 3rd party another company is referring too.

Over the weekend a massive number of articles and postings about the company Epsilon being hacked.  Epsilon, which provides emailing services for about 2500 companies worldwide (about 40 billion e-mails a year), disclosed that they had been hacked...with hackers taking only first names and email addresses (so far).  The average person might be thinking at this point, "Who cares I've never even heard of Epsilon?!  Stuff like this happens all the time".  While normally I would agree with most of you, it turns out that Epsilon manages email for many big name companies including banks.

Here is a list of companies so far that have been affected and have been sending out notices to their customers:

Barclay
Kroger
Brookstone.com
Walgreens
U.S. Bank
New York & Co.
JP Morgan Chase
McKinsey Quarterly
TiVo
Capital One
City Market
Fred Meyer
Fry's
Marriott Rewards
Ritz Carlton
Smith Brands
Citi
Home Shopping Network
Dillons
Jay C
Food 4 Less
King Snoopers
QFC
Ralphs
Ameriprise
Disney Destinations
AbeBooks
RobertHalfTechnology


For those of your browsing this list...your eyes might be getting bigger by the second.  These aren't small companies.  The fact that so many companies are looking foolish because of placing their trust in the same 3rd party for email really makes me start to wonder why there aren't any audits or safeguards in place for things like these.  While we can't be protected from everything it's pathetic that such a simple hack affects such high profile companies and the phising/spamming that is about to ensure is going to be unreal....

UPDATE - Add a few more to the list:

Target.com
Best buy

There are about 50 major companies on the list so far....