But let’s look at this from an Affiliate Marketing perspective.  What is the motive for the breach in the first place?

When hackers gain access to these email addresses their intent is not simply to send some spam emails.  The type of spam they’ll send will likely be a phishing scheme where the emails will appear to come from, let’s say, the persons bank for example.  They‘ll send an email and provide a link for the user to login to their account.  They’ll entice them to login to their account to update personal info or to read an urgent message.

Unknowingly, the recipient of the email clicks through to the page which appears to be their bank login and enters their, until now, secure user name and password. BAM!  Now the hacker not only has your email address, but also has your personal login into your bank account and access to all of your info including credit card #’s etc.

Now that they have this info, what will they do with it?  It’s not likely they’re looking to buy themselves a new, big screen TV.  That’s a quick way to get caught and make no money.  What’s more likely is they’re looking for a long term method of generating some serious income with the data.

That’s where affiliate marketing comes into play…  Armed with this database of stolen consumer info, they’ll go and sign up on for affiliate marketing programs and begin to push through illegitimate sales or leads using the stolen information in an attempt to game the system and collect illegal commissions.  This has proven a lucrative technique for hackers to monetize stolen data.  So online advertisers in the affiliate marketing space beware, when data breaches occur, affiliate fraud rates rise.