April 4, 2011 Epsilon Data Breach - What you need to know

If you haven't heard there was a massive breach and data stolen from a company called Epsilon. You may have never heard of Epsilon but you most likely have received an email from them. They manage the marketing deals for many large retail and financial institutions that you probably do business with. You can find more about the breach here.

Ironically and good timing on my part, I actually wrote a blog post a few days ago that got posted recently that discusses a similar topic. Here's the post.

I am not going to get in to the same blah, blah about data protection and the security lapse at Epsilon. No, this blog post is for the regular user and the very simple things you can do as to not get sucked into a scam. If you follow the Binary Rules you will not falter.

!!! EMAILS ARE WEB PAGES AND CAN LOOK LIKE ANYTHING, INCLUDING LIKE YOUR BANK/STORE WITH THEIR LOGOS AND EVERYTHING !!!
Always be suspect of any email from your store or bank about your account from activity you are not engaged in.

!!! NO COMPANY, EVER, EVER WILL ASK YOU TO VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT !!!!
This is the first sign of a B.S. email. You see a message from your bank that there is a problem with your account and if you don't log in it will be locked out. Something like that to put a little fear in you to click on a bogus link inside the email that takes you to a fake website that is designed to take your password as you enter it, thinking it's the real site but it's not. Don't believe it. Delete the email.

!!! THE ONLY EMAIL YOU SHOULD SEE FROM YOUR BANK ABOUT THIS BREACH IS INFORMING YOU OF THE BREACH... STILL THEY WILL NOT ASK YOU TO VERIFY YOUR ACCOUNT !!!
Same rules as above. DON'T BELIEVE EMAILS!

!!! The easiest way to ensure you don't make a mistake is to follow this simple rule !!!
Never, ever, ever, click on a link in an email to your institution. Always type in the address or use one of your known bookmarks. When you get there, verify the SSL certificate and make sure it's valid and assigned to your bank and the login page is HTTPS. If you have no idea what this means, don't use the Internet for financial banking.

The Epsilon breach so far only had email stolen. So, the only risk to you as a consumer is you are going to get phishing emails trying to trick you to link to fake websites that look like legit sites and try to get you to enter your password. They capture your password, then goto the real sites and clean you out or steal your identity.

This sounds scary but it's really not for what could have happened. Spam. Phishing emails. Luring attempts is the extent of the use of the data that was taken. How much farther the damage goes, once again, lies in the user's hands.

End of Line
@binaryblogger


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