dakhound wrote:tis is my opinion too, I believe it is a crime to steal peoples details.
Well, sarbanes-oxley in the US says publishing them is not a good thing (tm), I've often wondered what companies who list employee's email addresses on public websites are liable for when they use firstname.lastname for email addresses (possibly a lot), but over here, grabbing 'marketing information', like your phone number, address, and possibly by extension, email address and then re-selling that 'list' is not illegal.
Unfortunately, in North America, the almighty dollar that elects presidents/prime ministers stops them from making this illegal. Marketing firms have lots of $$$, so sadly, they get their say in Washinton/Ottawa far too often.
Spam is only kinda sort illegal, and this is just spam.
But, the point is the people who 'owned' the information have as much culpability as the 'thief'. If you let someone leave your building with a laptop/flash drive/cdrom burned on site, etc, then you are as responsible as they for the theft (for your shoddy information management practices).
It's not convenient to secure your data, so most organizations do a poor job of it, friend of mine was a victim of 'identity theft', and had much grief and lost a good part of 20,000 dollars (recovering it cost him thousands), because his bank let an independent contractor take REAL data on his laptop out of the building, to develop code for them. Why live data and not simulated data was required is anyone's guess (it wasn't), but it should be completley impossible to steal such things, sadly, in order to administer things securely, one has to be a jerk, and that doesn't always go over so well in corporate America.
Hmm, just a bit of personal tirade, thing is, there's no evidence to support the idea that email addresses were in the same database as financials, I wouldn't design it that way, and presumably the developers at Nevrax are at least that compentent, if not a good bit more.
Hehe
Using different email addresses for different stuff, and changing them sometimes, is useful. 
