Carbonite Privacy Breach Leads To Spam 134
richi writes "It looks like Carbonite, Inc. has been giving out customers' personal information. The company has admitted to giving customer email addresses to a third party, in direct contravention of its privacy policy. A company statement reads: 'Carbonite has discovered an advertiser misappropriated our e-mail list during the process of one of our e-mail marketing campaigns. When Carbonite launches an e-mail marketing campaign, it provides a suppression list to e-mail advertisers so that Carbonite customers do not receive promotion emails from Carbonite (since they’re already customers) and importantly, so that people who have opted out of receiving emails from Carbonite do not receive future email from us. This list was mishandled by an advertiser and we have taken immediate remedial efforts. As an online backup company, the security and privacy of our customer data is our top priority. We take all matters related to privacy very seriously. The matter will be addressed privately with the involved third parties and we will ensure that all customer e-mail addresses are permanently removed from their database.'"
Who was it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to prevent this stuff is to out the culprits who did this. Why would they protect a company that screwed their reputation?
Never liked Carbonite (Score:4, Insightful)
By "advertiser", they mean "spammer" (Score:4, Insightful)
So, they engaged an outfit of professional spammers, handed them their customer list and were surprised when the spammers did what spammers always do?
That's like buying a shark and shoving your dick in its mouth so that it can learn not to bite off your dick.
More proof opt-in is the ONLY way to do it right. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you RTFA, you'll quickly realize what Carbonite did was provide a 'do-not-spam' list to, well, a spammer... and then, surprise, surprise, the spammer misues or abuses it.
The list was Carbonite customers AND people who previously clicked the opt-out link in past Carbonite spam... So strictly speaking, this wasn't a straight list of Carbonite customers. Spam might be annoying, but there is a bigger issue here: If you wanted to phish Carbonite logins, you'd have a pretty good start.
Scrubbing the list in-house won't happen... Carbonite doesn't have huge lists, the spammers do. And the spammers are not going to give Carbonite their whole list to scrub, those things are money. So Carbonite has to give an opt-out list to the spammers and trust them not to spam it. Sure...
The article's suggestion of address hashes is kinda bogus, and especially dangerous if the hashed addresses are known to be customers. Assuming a spammer/phisher already has eleventy billion addresses, this is a hash collision attack. All the spammer has to do is hash their list and look for matches. Instant customer list.