On March 30th, in what is being touted on the Internet as one of the biggest hacks to date, hackers stole thousands of email addresses from the world’s largest permission-based e-mail marketer Epsilon.

Businesses such as JP Morgan Chase use Epsilon to send promotional emails or newsletters to their customers.

The hackers gained entry into Epsilon’s system and accessed the e-mails along with the customer names from major Epsilon clients. Epsilon insists that no sensitive personal data was compromised.

Epsilon posted this statement on their website: “the affected clients are approximately 2 percent of total clients and are a subset of clients for which Epsilon provides email services.”

It appears the hackers were “spear phishing”, by targeting the email addresses associated with a specific organization. The ultimate goal is to use this information to create and send authentic-looking emails from the companies they’ve hacked in an attempt to get consumers to reveal more specific personal financial information or distribute a computer virus.

Affected companies are notifying customers of the potential threat via emails similar to this one from Chase –

JP Morgan Chase offers these security recommendations in their email –

• Don’t give your Online User ID or password in e-mail.
• Don’t respond to e-mails that require you to enter personal information directly into the e-mail.
• Don’t respond to e-mails threatening to close your account if you do not take the immediate action of providing personal information.
• Don’t reply to e-mails asking you to send personal information.
• Don’t use your e-mail address as a login ID or password.

Chase offers wise advice that should be followed by everyone online.

Here at The Wealthy Dentist we do not use Epsilon, so our client’s data was NOT hacked. We take our dental client’s security very seriously. We recognize that hacking exists, so we caution that everyone be smart about their personal information.

For further details about the Epsilon email hack see: Epsilon E-Mail Hack: What You Need to Know at PCWorld.