Marketing services firm Epsilon has added new security enhancements to its email marketing platform in collaboration with Verizon Business, Epsilon president and CEO Bryan Kennedy told Direct Marketing News on June 28. The new features include enhanced protection for Epsilon’s information technology (IT) infrastructure and the ability to track malicious IP addresses.
“Epsilon has always taken security seriously and consistently surpassed established industry standards and requirements,” Kennedy said in an email. “This partnership demonstrates our ongoing commitment to protect our clients and their customers from cyber attacks.”
Epsilon said it will also launch access restrictions through its IP certification requirements in the third quarter that will allow only white-listed IP addresses access to Epsilon’s email platform.
“Certifying or white-listing IP addresses means that we require clients to register physical points of access to the platform in advance of their ability to utilize the platform from those locations,” Kennedy explained. “While this is a trade-off in the kind of flexibility clients have requested in the past, we believe it is a logical approach that enhances security, and clients understand that.”
Later this year, Epsilon will also launch an anti-phishing solution that it says will enable an open communication channel between marketers and Internet service providers, a way to differentiate between legitimate and fraudulent communications and a means to monitor abuse across email domains.
The IT protection feature combines intelligence from Verizon’s global-IP network, Internet traffic data, and breach statistics data. The service will run on a custom cloud. “Because it is cloud-based, it reduces the impact on Epsilon’s network operations and we don’t have to buy, maintain or configure hardware or software,” Kennedy said.
Verizon’s malicious IP address tracking will enable Epsilon to identify and mitigate “electronic crimes in motion,” according to a company statement.
Epsilon suffered a data breach on April 6 that affected several marketer clients, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Walgreen Co., Best Buy, Ameriprise Financial and TiVo.
The Epsilon breach was one of several recent breaches.
Citigroup said June 9 that it discovered an unauthorized person hacked the files of about 1% of its Citi North America bank card accounts.
Sony Corp. detected a mid-April breach into its customer database, where hackers accessed the personal information of about 100 million consumers, including the credit card information of 2.2 million members of the PlayStation Network and music service Qriocity.
Retail store chain The Children’s Place notified customers in April that an unauthorized third party accessed its email address database.
A recent report from Proofpoint, an email security supplier, found 35% of US companies investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information in the past 12 months.
For coverage of Epsilon in the Direct Marketing News Agency Business Report, click here.
