Amazon has sent out a number of emails to its customers, informing them that their account password has been reset because their information may have been compromised.
ZDNet broke the story, revealing that some its readers had got in touch after they received the notification from the online retailer.
The message from Amazon, which is believed to be genuine – although it has yet to be officially confirmed – starts by saying that the company takes “security and privacy very seriously”.
"Out of an abundance of caution, we have assigned a temporary password to your account."
“We recently discovered that your Amazon.co.uk password may have been improperly stored on your device or transmitted to Amazon in a way that could potentially expose it to a third party,” it said.
“We have corrected the issue to prevent this exposure. While we have no reason to believe your password was improperly disclosed to a third party, out of an abundance of caution, we have assigned a temporary password to your account.”
The ecommerce giant then details how users can regain access to their respective accounts.
News of this is likely to concern millions of its customers, especially seeing as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner.
It serves as a timely reminder of the importance of good password management, including having a unique password for every online account you have, as well as regularly changing those passwords.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that Amazon is now offering its customers the ability to adopt two-factor authentication capabilities. This offers additional security, making it harder for cybercriminals to breach accounts.
As ESET’s senior research fellow David Harley noted as early as 2013, “static passwords are a superficially cheap but conceptually unsatisfactory solution to a very difficult problem”.
