Amazon Disclosed Technical Glitch That May Have Revealed Your Email Address

It’s not the news you want to hear, but it’s important nonetheless. Amazon revealed just before all of the Black Friday shopping hubbub that it has accidentally revealed the email addresses of some users. Unfortunately, there is not much else that we know about this, but anyone who received email from Amazon about this should take notice and not simply ignore it.

The number of users has not been disclosed and not much else about this has either. We don’t know how it happened. The only thing Amazon did say is that it was due to a technical error and that it has been fixed. They also wrote in a notice to affected customers that there is no need to change passwords, as those were not included in the revealed data.

However, they are being rather secretive about this whole issue, so it’s probably not a bad idea to change it anyway. Make sure to include:

- Upper and lowercase letters
- At least one number
- At least one special character

If you did or didn't get a notification, watch for phishing emails. Phishers love a good reason to crank out a new campaign. If something like this hits the news, scammers are right there to capitalize. Remember never to click on links that come from unknown senders, are unexpected, no matter who the sender is, and that go to a location that doesn’t make sense. To determine this last bit, let the mouse pointer hover over the link for a couple of seconds and it’ll show where it’s headed. If you’re on a mobile device, hold down on the link for several seconds and it will bring up the entire link too. If you think you’re going to Amazon, but the link goes to some other place that you cannot be sure about, skip it. Either type in the address of where you think it should go (Amazon, in this case) or use a previously safely bookmarked link.

Remember to look for the telltale signs of phishing in your email messages:

- Typos and grammatical errors
- Misuse of the language in which the message is written
- Unprofessional verbiage
- Generic greetings such as “Dear User”
- A sense of urgency to click a link or something “bad” will happen

Because Amazon’s name is used in phishing email rather often, go directly into your account to verify details, change your password, or check on orders. Don’t click links in the messages that say they’re from Amazon. It’s just safer that way.

Stickley on Security
Published November 27, 2018