Just in time to get into the news at the same time as Amazon Prime Day, a hacker is claiming he breached an Amazon server with information on nearly 84,000 Kindle users. Fortunately, it appears to be bad information.
One security researcher who looked into the data said that for the most part it appears that the data does not actually belong to legitimate users and Amazon customers should not fear. Another researcher checked out the data and found that of the five random addresses in the leaked data, three were in the middle of “nowhere” between houses down a country road. Of the phone numbers he attempted to verify, none went through to people. All of the email addresses reviewed were in “random” formats; far too random as were the passwords that were associated with them.
The bottom line is that it is never a bad idea to change passwords on a regular and frequent basis. This means at least quarterly, but more often if it makes sense; such as for financial accounts. Be sure to include a combination of upper and lower case letters, a number or more, a special character or more, and don’t include sensitive data such as any part of your social security number or birthdate. They should always be hard to guess as well, so avoid actual words and phrases.
The hacker claims he offered to keep the data secret if Amazon paid him $700, but the company ignored his threat. He also said that his intent was to show a big company such as Amazon that they should have proper security and that he was merely trying to help. Since they didn’t reply to his demand, he uploaded the data to cloud storage and tweeted the link.
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