Epsilon, the largest email marketing company, is reeling from a huge breach of its clients’ personal email data. At least 19 major brands (and as many as 50) have been affected by the cyber attack, where hackers broke into the company’s systems and stole names and email addresses of lots of people.
Epsilon said that only 2 percent of its users had their name and email stolen. But that could add up to a very large number of users — surely in the millions — as Epsilon handles email marketing services for more than 2,500 companies. The problem is that cyber criminals can now use those email lists to send phishing attacks — with personalized messages from brands that consumers do business with — that could be much more effective than random email spam. The company says a full investigation is underway.
I received two emails — yeah, can you beat that number? — from some of those brands saying that my data had been leaked and that I should beware of suspicious emails. If you have signed up for or opted into email or other digital marketing campaigns from the affected brands, there’s a chance the thieves have your name and email. Epsilon sends billions of emails a year on behalf of its clients. That is jarring for consumers, since they’re getting emails today from brands who say they turned over their email address and the name that goes with it to an outsourcing company, Epsilon, that nobody ever heard about. The advice for now is, don’t respond to any new messages coming from these brands, and certainly don’t click on anything in your warning email.
Best Buy, one of the chains that was hit, told customers that it will never ask anyone to provide information such as credit card numbers unless they are on its secure e-commerce site www.bestbuy.com. If you receive an email asking for the personal information, you should delete it because “it did not come from Best Buy.” Citibank told customers it would send emails using your first and last name, the last four digits of a Citi credit account number, and the “member since” date to show that it’s a legitimate email.
The list includes the following companies. Please leave comments below about how many times your email was stolen and whether there are more companies than the ones below that are affected:
Target
Best Buy
Walgreen’s
Capital One
TiVo
JP Morgan Chase & Co.
Kroger
US Bank
Citi
McKinsey & Company
Ritz-Carlton Rewards
Marriott Rewards
New York & Company
Brookstone
The College Board
Home Shopping Network (HSN)
LL Bean
Disney Destinations
Barclays Bank of Delaware
[image credit: malwareresearchgroup]
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ISA Innovation
At today’s session, therefore, all our entrepreneurs were pitching from Malaysia. First up, Alvin Yuen from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, presented ISA Innovation, a company providing a hosted IT asset and inventory management solution. At present, ISA has a set of pilot clients and is toying with the idea of going global. Well, you can’t really go “global” without a go-to-market strategy that evaluates different markets, and assesses the competitive positioning in each of them. This strategy needs to be developed for ISA, and they have to pick a specific market to go after, rather than going global.
Math-Quest
Next, also from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Mohd Hezri Amir Abdul Latiff with HezMedia Interactive pitched Math-Quest, an edutainment company focusing on math learning games for kids aged nine to 12. One of the primary pieces missing from this presentation is a thorough competitive analysis of what other math games are in this market, and that will drive Math-Quest’s go-to-market strategy. Also, the business is primarily on CD-ROMs right now, but the good news is that the CD-ROM product is selling and generating revenue. It could be a good business to bootstrap the social/mobile edutainment business with.
I-Gamer
Then, Yong Wai Ming, from Bukit Jalil, Selangor, Malaysia, discussed I-Gamer, a gaming platform that connects gamers in cyber cafes. I-Gamer wants third-party game developers to develop games on its platform. Today, the company has about 15,000 cyber cafes paying subscription fees to be connected through their platform to play certain traditional games. The good news, again, is that this business is generating revenues. The company has ambitions of working with more cutting-edge gaming companies, but I don’t know enough about its platform to see why developers would choose to work with its platform as opposed to others like Facebook.
AppsAsia
Another entrepreneur from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Darren Panag with Convep Mobilogy, pitched AppsAsia, a mobile platform for business apps on various mobile devices such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and so on. The company sells to the marketing departments of corporations, has 50 customers, and is already profitable. Fantastic! We discussed its growth strategy, and my advice is to build the ad agency and interactive marketing channels as the primary growth driver. The entrepreneur seems obsessed with building his own brand and selling directly to end customers. A mistake, in my opinion.
Techsailor
Last up, Alvin Yuen from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, pitched Techsailor, a services company that provides online community engagement to major brands. Alvin seems perturbed by the fact that his business is largely services and not as much products. I don’t see a problem with this, especially since the services model generates cash early on, and he can practice our tried-and-true model of bootstrapping using services! This is also a business that has substantial revenue, which is wonderful. The entrepreneur is exploring ways to turn it into more of a product company as opposed to a pure services company. This is something we can certainly help him with, using our methodology.
Based on my assessment of the Malaysian entrepreneurs – we have seen a good sample of them over the past year – I think this is a group that would do well to go through the 1M/1M premium program as soon as possible, and internalize the curriculum. There are numerous basics that are missing from their business strategies right now, which are gaps that can be easily and efficiently plugged by adopting the 1M/1M methodology.
In addition, for several of the companies above, we have channel relationships that we can bring them into as soon as they are ready. As you know, we strongly believe in trying to get to customers and channel partners as early as possible and even using that as alternative financing, rather than beating the pavement looking for equity capital without adequate validation – a path that yields a 99% rejection rate.
Over time, if the Malaysian entrepreneurship ecosystem can groom several thousand technology entrepreneurs using the 1M/1M program, we envision an immense economic impact on the regional economy. We can also provide a subset of these entrepreneurs who are looking to penetrate the U.S./global market a strong channel through Silicon Valley.
This is an extremely important experiment that we are running in Malaysia. If successful, it can be replicated all over the world – throughout cities and towns in the United States, throughout the emerging markets, throughout every region that wants to efficiently groom a large number of technology entrepreneurs and unleash their power on the global economy. I am truly excited to welcome the Malaysian entrepreneurs and the visionaries in their ecosystem who are leading this movement, and every member of the 1M/1M team greets our friends in Malaysia with enormous enthusiasm. We fully grasp the potential of what you are embarking upon, and we look forward to our journey together.
I also have a message for all the various ecosystem players in Malaysia (and elsewhere): 1M/1M is not here to compete with any of you. We’re here to supplement your efforts and provide a base level of entrepreneurship education to a large number of entrepreneurs in your communities in a scalable manner through a virtual program. This, we believe, will create a strong downstream deal flow for all of you – incubators, angel investors, and VCs.
I will be traveling in India over the next several days and doing live roundtables in three cities: Chennai (April 9), Mumbai (April 16), and Pune (April 17). There will be no online roundtable next Thursday, but our usual schedule will resume on April 21 and focus on the northeastern part of the United States. You can register for the upcoming roundtables here.
You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative,an educational, business development and incubation program that aimsto help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond.She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book seriesand Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. As an entrepreneur CEO, she ran three companies: DAIS, Intarka, and Uuma. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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