Spamgourmet Saved My Email Identity

[tazlake]

Apparently using the SpamGourmet account was a good thing... Orbitz got hacked and spammers got my e-mail, but not the real one! This helped identify where the spam originated from and should help them track the little shits down... Thanks to Spamgourmet.

NOTE FROM ORBITZ BELOW...


Dear Mr. Lake,

You are one of a group of customers that has informed Orbitz that they received spam e-mails delivered Oct. 26 or Oct. 27 to a unique address used with our site. These particular spam e-mails are the focus of a concerted effort at Orbitz to track down the unknown party that apparently used unauthorized and/or illegal means to access customer e-mail addresses.

At Orbitz, we take seriously all issues relating to our data security. Protecting customer information is of the utmost importance to our company, which employs best practices in privacy and security, as well as industry-leading fraud protection systems.

We have informed law enforcement authorities about these reports. We've assembled an experienced security team that is conducting a thorough investigation and has taken a number of proactive steps to help identify individuals who may have been involved. Our security team has further heightened the extensive monitoring and analysis of potentially fraudulent activity that it regularly conducts, especially in regard to affected e-mail addresses. We want to assure you that we've found no evidence that customer password or credit card information has been compromised. In addition, we'd like you to know that, contrary to a few highly speculative media reports regarding hackers, Orbitz has found nothing to substantiate that e-mail information was obtained through unauthorized access to our website.

For those of you who have not yet changed your registered e-mail address, we encourage you to do so, if possible. You can help our investigation by letting us know immediately if you receive additional e-mails or have further information in regard to this matter. We continue to urge customers who have registered a unique or "tagged" email address with us to please forward to spam@orbitz.com any additional spam they may receive. This will enable our security team to research them in a timely manner.

Your technical expertise and watchfulness provided an early warning system that helped Orbitz respond quickly in this matter. We appreciate your cooperation and sincerely regret any inconvenience this situation may have caused you.

The Orbitz Management Team

[James Day]

My response to that email would be to ask Orbitz why they believe that whoever got the email addresses didn't also get the credit card details, if you have any stored with them. If you don't get a satisfactory answer and you have a credit card stored wtih Orbitz, I'd cancel the card for self protection, assuming that the email addresses came from the same database as holds the credit card details.