Gotta love them data breaches!

[thewayne]

Got an email a couple of nights ago from Tivo that their email processing service had been hacked and my email address had been compromised, so be on the lookout for more spam email. What a surprise. Today, Walgreens sent a similar email.

*sigh*

Both assured me that no other information was compromised and that it was a third-party email system that was only used for email marketing campaigns. We'll see.

[EDIT]

The instant after I posted this message, I got the following from 1-800-Flowers:

One of our email service providers, Epsilon, has informed us that we
are among a group of companies affected by a data breach that may
have exposed your email address to unauthorized third parties.
It's important to know that this incident did not
involve other account or personally identifiable information.

Comments

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

Chase and Best Buy got hit in this too.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

As if we don't get enough spam as is.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

My wife, amazingly smart person that she is (almost as smart as me and much better educated), pointed out that these addresses could be used to send spearphishing emails against my friends. A guy in our Warcraft guild had his account hacked a while back, which meant his email account name was compromised, so he sent out an email to everyone saying 'if I send you an email, it will contain the phrase XYZ so you know it's from me.' I thought that was a very good idea, and this is the thing my wife recommended last night. So I guess I need to do that.

Another thing that I should do, and I hate doing it, is when I send URL's, I use Yahoo Mail's Link feature, so it's actually a clickable link. I hate having to copy/paste a text URL from an email to a browser address window, but I guess I ought to start doing that.

[(Anonymous)]

So is it legit or BS? I noticed the "unsubscribe" link for 1-800-flowers is a mile long on the same email I received.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Good point. This would be an excellent time to send out malware email.

I have not used the unsubscribe link since the email that I receive from the sites that were compromised is very light. I think what I would do is go directly to the site in question and unsubscribe via their preferences pages.

I don't normally unscreen anonymous posts, but you asked a cogent question rather than posted a bunch of URLs.

[silveradept]

Faaaantastic. I'll bet there's just an uptick in spam in general going out.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there will be. I have no idea how many companies and email addresses were compromised with this Epsilon hack.

[silveradept]

So long as it's e-mail, though, it seems okay. Might be that because I have dummy addresses that I use to sign up for stuff, and then there's the one that I do actual correspondence with that doesn't get used for sign-up for anything, ever.