Commtouch has published ”The State of Hacked Accounts” which suggests that 62% of internet users who have been hacked are unaware that have been hacked are unaware of how their accounts had been compromised.

In addition, half of those who did notice something was wrong, only found out their accounts had been compromised when friends or business associates said, “I got this strange email from you…” (meaning the address list had been stolen).

Websense Security Labs has also observed a rise in spam being sent from corporate Webmail accounts.

As a result more and more webmail accounts belonging to email marketing organizations are being compromised to send spam with malicious links.

Worse, an electronic break in at Epsilon (an email marketing firm) resulted in the theft of an unknown number of customer emails from such firms as Best Buy, Citigroup, Walgreen, and Disney.

This theft is in addition to the daily reports of loss of data through losing laptops etc.  Just yesterday we had reports of a local authority and a school which had lost data on children, including their addresses, illnesses, educational situations etc.  (See http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/)

All this adds to the feeling that digital marketing is not the easy low price option that it has been seen – and yet companies that would never leave the premises at night without locks, alarms and security guards outside, regularly leave their internet provision open.

Quite possibly it is why we are now seeing a huge return to postal direct marketing - either on its own or in combination with email campaigns.

If you would like to talk about this approach, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.  And we have a web site that explores postal direct mail http://www.directmail.org.uk/

Tony

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.