Kroger Customer Email List Compromised

Retail supermarket chain Kroger is the latest entry on a long list of companies whose customer email databases were stolen by hackers in recent months.

Kroger began sending out notification emails to customers yesterday in order to inform them about the incident and warn them of potential risks.

"Kroger wants you to know that the data base with our customers’ names and email addresses has been breached by someone outside of the company. [...]

"As a result, it is possible you may receive some spam email messages. We apologize for any inconvenience," Kroger's email reads.

The company goes on to warn customers about phishing emails that might ask them to provide personal and financial details like credit card details.

According to the Cincinnati Business Courier, the breach occurred at Kroger's email marketing partner, Dallas-based Epsilon Data Management.

A notice about the intrusion was posted on Epsilon's website. "On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset of Epsilon clients' customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon's email system," it reads.

The company is currently performing a full investigation, but it is confident no other personal identifiable information was at risk.

This incident comes after a little over a week ago, TripAdvisor alerted its users that hackers broke into its database and stole a partial list of email addresses.

A few days earlier, Play.com, one of the largest UK online retailers of video games, books and DVDs, admitted that infected emails received by its customers were the result of its email database being stolen from an US-based email marketing provider called Silverpop.

The Silverpop breach, which was disclosed last year, is believed to have affected over 100 companies, including McDonald's, Walgreens, Honda Motors or deviantART.