Add Dell Australia to the list of Epsilon victims

David Heath
Thursday, 07 April 2011 01:30

Business IT - Security

Yesterday afternoon, a very large number of Australians received an email from Dell advising them that their name and email address were lost in the same intrusion that has affected a large number of companies world wide.

Yesterday, we wrote of the intrusion into Epsilon Interactive that has exposed a vast number of names and email addresses of people around the world.  Since then, this writer received the dreaded email from one of the organisations named previously.

As yet, there has been no information as to how the breach happened or who might have obtained the information. 

According to Epsilon's site: "How Is Information About Me Kept Secure?"

"We protect information we collect about you by maintaining physical, electronic and procedural safeguards. All information is secure and may be accessed only by key staff members of Epsilon. We take reasonable precautions to protect your information both online and offline. Periodically, our employees are notified about the importance we place on privacy and security, and what they can do to ensure our clients' information is protected. The servers on which we store data are kept in a secure environment."

Clearly these procedures and safeguards were not enough; however one is reminded of the many organisations who think a yearly email to all staff and a couple of hokey posters in the lunch room constitute a security policy.

Yesterday afternoon, a very large number of Dell Australia customers found themselves added to the list.