Monday, April 4, 2011

E-mail Security Concerns with major retailers.

A head's up. Please please read. I got these emails from BOTH Target and Walgreens (kind of waiting to see what other companies use Epsilon at this point- wondering how many more emails we'll get) within 10 minutes of one another today!
Dear Valued Customer,
On March 30th, we were informed by Epsilon, a company we use to send emails to our customers, that files containing the email addresses of some Walgreens customers were accessed without authorization.
We have been assured by Epsilon that the only information that was obtained was your email address. No other personally identifiable information was at risk because such data is not contained in Epsilon's email system.

For your security, we encourage you to be aware of common email scams that ask for personal or sensitive information. Walgreens will not send you emails asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. If ever asked for this information, you can be confident it is not from Walgreens.
We regret this has taken place and any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any questions regarding this issue, please contact us at 1-855-814-0010. We take your privacy very seriously, and we will continue to work diligently to protect your personal information.
Sincerely,
Walgreens Customer Service Team
This came from Target within 10 minutes of the Walgreens one:
To our valued guests,
Target’s email service provider, Epsilon, recently informed
us that their data system was exposed to unauthorized entry.
As a result, your email address may have been accessed by
 an unauthorized party. Epsilon took immediate action to
close the vulnerability and notified law enforcement.While
no personally identifiable information, such as names and
credit card information, was involved, we felt it was
important to let you know that your email may have been compromised. Target
would never ask for personal or financial information through email.Consider
these tips to help protect your personal information online:
  • Don’t provide sensitive information through email. Regular email is not a secure method to transmit personal information.
  • Don’t provide sensitive information outside of a secure website. Legitimate companies will not attempt to collect personal information outside a secure website. If you are concerned, contact the organization represented in the email.
  • Don’t open emails from senders you don’t know.
We sincerely regret that this incident occurred. Target takes information protection
very seriously and will continue to work to ensure that all appropriate measures are
taken to protect personal information. Please contact Guest.Relations@target.com
should you have any additional questions.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Gross
Vice President, Marketing and Guest Engagement

I put the VERY important suggestions we all need to keep in mind in BOLD for Walgreens and in RED for Target. Did you receive these letters from anyone else today or recently?
**Update: Some readers have said they received the same notices from Best Buy, Disney Reservations and Brookstone.

Huge thank you to QueenB at This Mama Loves Her Bargains for providing this post.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I've received an email from Disney, Best Buy, Target, Walgreens, HSN and Ralphs.

Diana Mancuso said...

I received a similar email from Airmiles yesterday.

Kristin said...

I got a similar one from Hilton Honors (their rewards program).

What a mess.

Kristin :)
Keenly Kristin

heidi said...

I also got one from NY&Co. Epsilon controlled email lists for a LOT of companies

lfhpueblo said...

You'll be getting them for tons of companies, because Epsilon is a third party provider for many companies. I even went to the Epsilon website today and no mention of the breach, and no apologizes to anyone affected was on their website. They need to own up to it and take responsibility.
1-800 Flowers,
Krogers,
HSN,
the ones you listed and probably a hundred more.
Nothing you can do about it now, your name and email has been gobbled up by some spammer probably.
Since this has happened I've been getting numerous emails sent to me that have no name and no subject, the whole line is blank, so I don't attempt to open it, it just goes into the trash. Have you or anyone else been getting these since this breach this company's has happened? Just wondering.

abitnerdy said...

hopping over from UBP11 :) I got a bunch of those epsilon e-mails too. Le sigh when tech goes awry my poor inbox. Cheers xo

http://www.agentnerdy.com