By Laura Strickler and Aurora Ellis
Companies like Best Buy, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase and TiVo have been notifying customers of a large data breach where names and email addresses have been hacked. CBS News has confirmed at least 20 companies including Kroger, Hilton Honors, Home Shopping Network and Marriott Rewards were impacted.
What do these companies all have in common?
They all pay the email marketing company Epsilon, based in Dallas, to email their customers on their behalf. Epsilon says it sent 40 billion emails last year to customers and handles the email marketing for 2,500 companies. The company says their clients operate “primarily in the financial services, specialty retail, hospitality and pharmaceutical end-markets.”
Experts say the good news is this was not credit card data or Social Security numbers. But Mike Lennon, a reporter at Security Week, says the threat he sees is that this data will give scammers what they need to “personalize the attacks.”
Read more…
Secret Service investigates Epsilon data breach – CBS News Investigates – CBS News.
