McDonald's and Walgreens: email addresses, birth dates stolen by hackers
Hackers gained access to a McDonald's database containing an unspecified number of customer email address and birth dates. No mention of passwords stolen.
The Ronald McDonald balloon floats through Macy's Thanksgiving day parade in New York Nov. 25, 2010.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
It鈥檚 not been a good week for email security,鈥� site notes. Just a day after the Gawker blog network was hacked and comes news that another and very, very different company鈥檚 databases have been compromised by : .
According to Reuters, 惭肠顿辞苍补濒诲鈥檚 Corp has just announced that hackers gained access to a database containing an unidentified number of email address and birthdates for the strange breed of person who goes to 惭肠顿辞苍补濒诲鈥檚鈥� websites and decides to subscribe.
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On the one hand, the hack is less invasive than the Gawker hack, because it doesn鈥檛 appear that passwords were compromised. On the other hand, 惭肠顿辞苍补濒诲鈥檚 is being cagey about the actual numbers of customers involved鈥� and while credit card numbers, passwords and social security numbers were not compromised, birthdays were鈥� making it possible on some sites for those email addresses to be paired with birthday security questions.
and 惭肠顿辞苍补濒诲鈥檚 aren鈥檛 the only huge breaches in the last week. On Friday, Walgreens admitted that one of their databases containing customer email addresses had been breached as well.
One thing鈥檚 for sure: it鈥檚 been a great week for hackers, and for the email who were given the windfall of a few million email addresses to start bombarding.
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[Editor's note: The original headline of this story misidentified one of the hacked companies. It was Walgreens and McDonald's that faced database breaches.]