Washington Post: Advertiser Charged in Massive Database Theft

Federal prosecutors charged Scott Levine of Boca Raton, FL (of course) with hacking into the systems of database marketing firm Acxiom to steal massive numbers of names, email addresses and other information to feed his alleged spam efforts. Coupled with last month's revelations about AOL's email list being sold several times over, email users are now realizing that their own efforts to keep their email addresses close to their vests can only go but so far in protecting them from spam.

It wasn't the first time Acxiom - a company with information on most Americans - had its system pillaged, but the firm said that it has now introduced better security. The new charges involve the downloading of 8.2 gigabytes of data, according to DM News, which translates roughly into about 20 pages of text data for every American.