Amazon's technical glitch may have exposed some of its Indian customers

Severity of vulnerability is low as data leakage is restricted to names and emails only, say experts

With a technical slip exposing the names and email addresses of some of Amazon’s customers, security experts are of the opinion that it is a gap in the system which would have affected the e-commerce giant India users as well. 

“This is something called unintended information disclosure. Although the severity of such a vulnerability is very low but is surely considered as a gap in the system,” said Saket Modi, chief executive officer of Lucideus, a cyber security firm based on New Delhi.

He said he was certain the software glitch would have affected some users from India too. “However the maximum damage someone can do is to send out spear phishing emails to the leaked database or try and brute force the password,” Modi added. 

It was learnt that the Amazon website had inadvertently disclosed email addresses and names of some of its customers due to a technical error. “We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted,” the company said in an emailed response. 

Sources said Amazon had emailed impacted customers out of caution to let them know that their email addresses or both names and email addresses were disclosed.

The glitch comes on the back of the Black Friday sales which begin in the US today. Amazon India too has over 800 Black Friday deals on its global store section. Since the offers are at a very low scale in India, brand experts feel it would not dent sales prospects much.

Independent communications consultant Karthik Srinivasan said, people are way too entrenched in the Amazon ecosystem to not buy from it unless the nature of the leak is drastic. 

“This glitch would not affect Black Friday sales since it seems to be restricted to names and email ids at best and not bank/payment details,” said the brand expert.