This content was created by Robert Siciliano. This content was uploaded by Robert Siciliano. This is a YouTube news/interview segment titled "Epsilon Hacked Potentially Millions of Emails Robert Siciliano www.IDTheftSecurity.com" (posted April 5, 2011). An interviewer (Speaker A) speaks with identity-theft expert Robert Siciliano (Speaker B) about a large marketing-company breach affecting customers of Best Buy, Disney, Walgreens and others, explaining what it means for an email address to be compromised and the phishing and fraud risks that can follow.
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Meanwhile, from cracks in airplanes to cracks in data security, millions of Americans just finding out that their email address has been compromised due to what they call a hacker attack. Shoppers at Best Buy, Disney, Walgreens, and many, many others notified of this breach. What information could these hackers get their hands on? With this, with me now, identity theft expert Robert Siciliano. Robert, you know, I was notified of this after I was recently at Disney. I got an email saying, hey, you know, you were breached, and I thought, well, that's not good. But I mean, um, what's going on?
So a marketing company that handles a lot of really big companies, banks and retailers, got hacked. They handle like 40 billion marketing emails per year, and we don't know how many emails at this point have been compromised. And as a result, the companies that are affected will be rolling out just this week all notifications via email that, uh, your and my email address had been compromised. I got one too, and I'm sure I'm gonna get more. And, uh, they're putting those emails—
I'm sorry, Robert, what does it mean when someone says your email address has been compromised? What are they getting?
So they're just getting your name and they're getting your email address, which in and of itself isn't that big of a deal. However, uh, scammers that are going after this type of information will use it to phish you with the PH. They'll use it to scam you. They'll send you off an email that looks like it's coming from your bank. It looks like it's coming from a retailer, and it's designed to get you to enter your credentials, usernames and passwords, and maybe even steal your credit card information.
So if you do that, obviously then you've been sucked in, and then a lot of bad things can happen. They can drain your bank account, yada yada, right?
Yeah, and unfortunately, the entire public isn't aware of what phishing actually is. I mean, I know what phishing is. You probably do too, but not everybody is. And when they receive these They just think that this is coming from a trusted source and they begin to respond to it. They plug in their credentials, they enter credit card information, and they get, you know, hooked. And that will happen. People will get nailed by this. Wow, that's pretty scary stuff. Robert, thank you very much. Thank you. Robert Siciliano.
