It’s been an interesting few days for Amazon and its customers. The monolithic online retailer recently made a lot of consumers happy be rolling out two-step authentication to accounts in order to try and make using Amazon a lot more secure. Now, the company has been forced to proactively reset an unknown number of customer account passwords without their knowledge after what might be a massive password leak. No intricate information has been provided about the leak, or in particular, how many accounts it has actually affected.
A number of otherwise-happy Amazon customers have been taking to various blog sites and social media outlets to discuss the fact that they have been receiving emails from Amazon informing them of the password reset on their account. It seems that the same email message has also been sent to the internal messaging center within the customer’s Amazon account. Of course, this is only accessible when they log back in and reset their password after the forced changed. The existence of the messages within Amazon.com confirms that the security measure put in place is genuine.
The Amazon email that is currently being received reads as follows:
We recently discovered that your password may have been improperly stored on your device or transmitted to Amazon in a way that could potentially expose it to a third party. We have corrected the issue to prevent this exposure.
Additional information contained in the email tried to prevent users from jumping to the obvious conclusion by stating that it had no reason to believe that any passwords had been disclosed to an unauthorized third party with malicious intent, but that the forced password reset has taken place out of an “abundance of caution”. If there’s anything that consumers appreciate from large companies when their personal data is at stake, it’s an abundance of caution.
It’s been a bit of a security-focused week for Amazon. First the introduction of two-step authentication across accounts around the world and now the precautionary measure of resetting user passwords to prevent any possible malicious account access. If you’ve received one of those account emails, you better get your password changed quickly so you can take advantage of the Black Friday deals that are being offered online by the retailer.
Also, don’t forget to turn on two-step authentication for your Amazon account, steps for which can be found here: Enable Two-Step Verification On Your Amazon Account, Here’s How.
(Source: ZDNet)
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