Amazon Warns 220 Million Customers Of Prime Account Attacks
I know better than most that Amazon Prime subscribers are under attack: I have been on the sharp end of multiple phone calls and email-based threats in the last four weeks alone. I have the advantage of being a cybersecurity insider, and so you would expect me to be aware of such threats and deal with them accordingly. Not everyone is so well informed, however, which is why Amazon has warned all 220 million Prime customers as attackers strike. Here's what you need to know and do.
Amazon Warns Hundreds Of Millions Of Customers As Attackers Strike
Pieter Arntz, a malware intelligence researcher at Malwarebytes, has issued a timely July 16 reminder that 'scammers are impersonating Amazon in a Prime membership scam.' I say timely, quite besides regular reminders of such attack threats being most welcome, because I have experienced not one, but two of these this week. Both were telephone calls, which I only answered as I was expecting to hear from the hospital and was in bed, ill at the time. The cause of Arntz's reminder, and the underlying Amazon warning to all 220 million Prime customers, however, was a spike in email attacks claiming that subscription rates are about to rise, along with a cancel subscription button that would lead to Prime account credential theft. The phone calls I took, by the way, were similar in outcome but differed in that they wanted me to believe someone had purchased an iPhone 13, of all things, using my account.
The warning emails from Amazon, which I received on July 4 and wrote about at Forbes on the very same day, started with a stark alert that Amazon has become aware of 'an increase in customers reporting fake emails about Amazon Prime membership subscription.' These emails are particularly dangerous because, as Amazon said, they 'might include personal information in the emails, obtained from other sources, in an attempt to appear legitimate.' This came on top of earlier warnings from security researchers that more than 120,000 fake Amazon domains and web pages had been set up in the weeks and months before Prime Day, one assumes to be used to help in such attacks.
How To Mitigate Prime Attacks, According To Amazon
The attack warning email from Amazon included a number of mitigation recommendations, including:
You can find further advice from Amazon online regarding how it protects customers from scams, along with the best ways to report an attack.
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