The online marketing company Epsilon was hacked, exposing thousands of its clients’ names and e-mail addresses. Now authorities are trying to make sure that no harm comes to the clientsThe online marketing company, Epsilon got hacked recently showcasing the vulnerability of the internet.

Epsilon is an internet marketing giant that had many famous companies as its clients, and now all of them have been exposed to the risk of information theft.Some of the companies which are the clients of Epsilon are Citigroup Inc, College Board, Walgreens, TiVo Inc, Capital One Financial Corp, HSN Inc, J.P. Morgan Chase, Disney and Kroger.All these companies have stepped forward to warn their customers about the Epsilon hacking, so that they are aware of any mysterious actions which may take place over the next few days.

As yet, it has not been established who hacked Epsilon, however, one thing is for sure and that is that the hacker was not an employee of the company. The information which was stolen just consisted of people’s names and their e-mail addresses and thankfully, no credit card information or social security numbers were stolen.The Epsilon hacking incident is being considered to be one of the biggest internet security breaches in the history of the United States and it shows how sensitive this data is – and how easily it can be lost.

Epsilon also manages the accounts of some students affiliated with the US-based College Board. College Board administers the SAT aptitude tests and this particular organization is in contact with more than 7 million students. The students were also contacted about Epsilon’s security breach and were asked not to open links pointing to suspicious third parties.

Law enforcement authorities have already started investigating into the matter and in this regard, Epsilon has volunteered to lend its full support. “While we are cooperating with authorities and doing a thorough investigation, we cannot say anything else,” said Epsilon spokeswoman Jessica Simon. “We can’t confirm any impacted or non-impacted clients, or provide a list of companies at this point in time.”

via Online marketer Epsilon gets hacked.

Pictured below is what’s known as a skimmer, or a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. Skimmers have been around for years, of course, but thieves are constantly improving them, and the device pictured below is a perfect example of that evolution.This particular skimmer was found Dec. 6, 2009, attached to the front of a Citibank ATM in Woodland Hills, Calif. Would you have been able to spot this?

via Would You Have Spotted the Fraud? — Krebs on Security.

researchers have developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but also could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within the routers that direct traffic on the Internet, according to Vincent Chan , an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team. Chan told Computerworld that replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100 times — if not 1,000 times — faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.Savvis Symphony Dedicated and Open : Download nowWhat would the Internet be like if it ran that much faster? Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, according to Chan.With increasingly powerful computer processors and bandwidth-hungry applications, the Internet will reach a “choke point” within three to five years, Chan said. Today’s routers have trouble dealing with incoming fiber-optic signals, so those signals are converted into electrical signals that can be stored in memory until they can be processed, according to MIT’s report . The electrical signals are subsequently converted back to optical signals so they can be sent back out.That process eats up time and energy, so Chan and his team developed technology they call flow switching that would eliminate the need for such conversions.

via MIT Design Could Speed Up the Internet.