McDonalds hacked, customer database stolen, your burger preference now in the wild

Don't worry, this one isn't quite as bad as the Gawker hack: McDonalds -- and over 100 other firms -- have had their marketing databases compromised, and summarily stolen. An email marketing company called Silverpop is to blame for the breach -- and fortunately, 'only' real names, interests and email addresses were breached; no passwords, and no Social Security or credit card numbers were stolen.

While McDonalds is probably the biggest name on the list, it seems the creative users of deviantART are also affected -- and a brief look at Silverpop's site suggests it might have upset some other very big names, such as Mazda and the banking giant Santander.

There's no information about how the hack was achieved, but the FBI has said that the attack originated from outside the US. In all likelihood, the attack was probably carried out by spammers, or the operatives of spammers. An email address database the size of Silverpop's would sell for millions.

Tags: database, deviantart, email, email marketing, EmailMarketing, hack, mcdonalds, security, silverpop, spam, spammers, web