Amazon says a technical error on its website exposed the names and email addresses of some customers.
The online retail giant says it has fixed the issue and emailed those affected. Amazon says its website and systems were not hacked.
An Amazon spokesman did not answer additional questions, like how many people were impacted or whether any of the information was stolen.
In a short statement, Amazon said: “We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted.”
Avivah Litan, a senior analyst at Gartner, says email addresses can be used by bad actors for what’s known as phishing: contacting people by email and trying to trick them into providing additional sensitive information, like their passwords or Social Security numbers.
The disclosure from Amazon comes as it gears up for the busy holiday shopping season. The Seattle-based company is expected to grab as much as half of all online sales by the end of this year, according to Bain & Co.
(AP)
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Once again we see how unsafe the digital world is. We must proceed with caution into an all digital world. Without strong safeguards and serious policing, we are asking for a disaster. Remember that “technical error” means human error. Machines do not make mistakes, people do. This will most likely always be true. When serious damage can occur due to human error, like a nuclear war, layers and layers of safeguards are created. This must also be the case with the digital world. There is great pressure to eliminate physical money and have it all digital. Banks are systematically eliminating physical banking in favor of online banking. Imagine the repercussions of a “technical error” that brought down or seriously corrupted the online banking system! Then of course there is the much more serious problem of malicious error.