Amazon has reset passwords for some customer accounts after they discovered some passwords may have been incorrectly stored and could possibly be exposed to a third party. The notices have been confirmed as genuine as they are also visible in the message centre in the account section of the Amazon website.
Advertisement
‘We have corrected the issue to prevent this exposure’.
Amazon took the action out of an “abundance of caution”, the letter said, and the company noted that had “no reason” to believe customer passwords were revealed to a third party.
Amazon (AMZN – Get Report) may be facing some untimely security issues in advance of the holiday weekend. Starting on Friday, November 20th, Amazon began offering eight days of shopping deals.
With its busiest period of trading round the corner, Amazon can’t afford to be the next TalkTalk, and is subtly dealing with the issue, which, it assures in the email has now been fixed to avoid a repeat. That means users will be required to provide a second form of identification-typically, a time-sensitive code-in addition to the typical email and password requirement. You can request that your mobile browser open the desktop version of Amazon.com if you want to use the two-factor authentication to sign-in. After that, you’ll see “Advanced Security Settings” and an edit button. This two-step verification could be a way for users to further lock down their accounts.
The first news of password problems at Amazon came via ZDNet.
“As part of our routine monitoring, we discovered a list of email address and password sets posted online”.
Advertisement
A possible Amazon (AMZN) password leak has some users having their passwords reset.
