On April Fools’ Day, early reports circulated that Epsilon, the large email service company, had lost email addresses of many of its prominent customers.  This turns out NOT to be an April Fools’ joke – the names and email addresses used by Epsilon’s customers had, in fact, been compromised.  Reuters reports that email lists used by CitiBank, Walgreens and Best Buy had all been compromised.  In fact, as reported by SecurityWeek, dozens of brands were impacted, including JPMorgan Chase, US Bank, Target, Home Shopping Network, The College Board, and Marriott Rewards. How could this happen?  Epsilon was the victim of a [...]

It is tax time again in the USA.  And that is the time for fake emails that pretend to be from the IRS.  In its recent Tax Tip 2011-58, the IRS advised: Identity Theft: It pays to be choosy when it comes to disclosing personal information. Identity thieves have used stolen personal data to access financial accounts, run up charges on credit cards and apply for new loans. The IRS is aware of several identity theft scams involving taxes or scammers posing as the IRS itself. The IRS does not use e-mail to contact taxpayers about issues related to their [...]

You may remember reports of a spies infiltrating U.S. government computers using phishing email pretending to be from President Obama.  The U.S. is not alone in suffering from these high-tech espionage methods. Reports out of Canada tell of another carefully crafted phishing scheme which compromised Canadian government computers.  The attack, which appeared to originate from China, involved the hackers posing as senior bureaucrats sending email to technical staffers.  The technical staffers were fooled into giving the fake officials key passwords, thereby allowing unauthorized network access.  At the same time, the bad guys sent other staffers emails with seemingly innocuous attachments; [...]