The massive email breach at Epsilon, the World’s biggest email marketing services company, has rightly caused headlines as it appears customer addresses from many of the world’s largest brands has been leaked to spammers and crooks.
Epsilon looks after the email services of major brands, including Tivo, Marks & Spencer, McKinsey and Dell Australia so the breach has exposed many people’s email addresses.
What does this mean?
The breach has not exposed passwords or credit card details, so there’s no direct threat from the breach.
However, having your name, email address and a company you’ve dealt with means a phishing attack, where a crook poses as a business you’ve dealt with and tries to get your passwords, will be more effective.
Normally these messages are a give away as they aren’t addressed personally to you and are often from organisations, usually foreign banks, you’ve never dealt with.
However a scammer who knows the organisation along with your name and email address can now launch a pretty convincing fake email campaign directing you to a site pretending to be say a competition or a security warning that asks you for your password.
Given many people use the same passwords for all the secure sites they visit, there’s a reasonable chance the bad guys will get a large number of live accounts and be able to access victims’ bank accounts, email services and social media sites.
What should you do?
The first thing is to be careful, don’t respond to any suspicious emails and if you are uncertain call the organisation’s support line from a number although do not use any numbers or other contact details shown on the suspicious email.
If you are concerned you have fallen for a trick, then change all your passwords immediately, we’d also suggest following the instructions on the IT Queries website and having a layered approach to security where sites which don’t matter have simple passwords.
We can also expect a wave of fake email and social media messages as peoples’ personal pages and accounts are hijacked and the scammers try posing as other people.