"As a precaution," as every company claims these days, Amazon has begun resetting passwords for a select list of users whose personal information was exposed online.
The company says no one breached its servers, but that it took this step after its security staff discovered a series of customer details published online as part of another breach at another company.
Amazon says that this information matched Amazon account information, and since it had no way of knowing whether its customers had reused the same passwords for their Amazon accounts, it decided to err on the side of caution and reset these customers' passwords, just to be safe.
Password reset emails began being sent last week, when several users posted screenshots on Twitter, and have continued to be sent to users this week.
So far, only a small number of users have reported receiving these emails. The exact number of customers affected is currently unknown.
Amazon took a similar step of resetting users' passwords in July, when a hacker, going by the Twitter name 0x2Taylor, uploaded a file online with information for 80,000 Amazon Kindle users.
Amazon denied that it had been hacked, which may be true since hackers can and do collect login credentials using malware (password dumpers, infostealers, keyloggers) and it is not necessary that Amazon's well-protected servers were breached.
However, that wasn't the case, as 0x2Taylor posted a screenshot of some of the leaked data hours later, saying that Amazon ignored him after he reported the security issue.
According to those who managed to get a copy of the leaked data before it was downloaded, the file included information such as the user's email, password, city, state, phone number, zip code, useragent string, IP address, and street address information.
While for this particular incident the truth seemed to lean towards the side of 0x2Taylor, Amazon should be happy that it is only plagued by smaller-scale breaches and not major breach events that expose the details of hundreds of millions of users (see Yahoo).
