I see an increasing number of reports here in Japan of hacking of customer information from the systems of various companies. Numerous of these breeches involve the data of millions of users.
Almost universally, however, the announcement in the Japanese news is that the company affected says that there has been no report of the stolen data being improperly used.
I call total irrelevance and bullshit on that.
I think two different things are at work here. One is Japan’s 事なかれ主義, which encourages people to gloss over any problems that might be happening or might be waiting on the near horizon.
The other aspect of this is that people limit their fear of damage by these hacking incidents to things like someone using credit card information.
There are lots of other ways that the information stolen can be used.
One example probably nobody gives much thought to is use of the email addresses. Spammers normally don’t want to shotgun email, they would rather that all the addresses of their victims be verified as live and valid. But having a list of live email addresses is valuable. It’s not only valuable. It’s sellable. When you list the email addresses and they are linked to a specific seller, you an even more valuable list of information.
Could it be that people are just saying “Oh well, we get spam all the time, so who cares?
I personally would care, particularly if they linked to my email address to a specific business.
That said, I use alias email addresses, so that if I start getting spam at a purpose-specific alias, I can just trash the address.
There are surely few people, however, who use email aliases, so once their address gets hacked, they’re in for more spam and can’t delete their address because they use it for other, more legitimate things.