Mint.com is a free, personal finance web site owned by Intuit. On Wednesday, it mistakenly sent out some 11 million emails to most of its 4 million users, which caused many them to worry that their financial accounts had been hacked, the AP reports.
Mint.com said that the problem wasn't caused by hackers but instead was caused by "a misconfiguration with our email provider."
The company apologized, of course, and said that it would "post an update on the Mint.com homepage soon to let users know what went wrong."
As of this blog post, no further information has been posted. I'll let you know when it does.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.