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Amazon's Customer Service Backdoor (medium.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the be-less-helpful-please dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Eric Springer describes his recent troubles with Amazon to highlight one of the biggest weak points in information security: customer service. You can use complex passwords and two-factor authentication all you want — all it takes is a low-level representative trying to be helpful and your account information is now compromised. In this case, a bad actor was able to use Amazon's online chat support and a fake address to get the rep to tell him Springer's real address and phone number. That was enough to commit fraud with a couple of unrelated online services. Springer complained, but months later the same thing happened again. That time, he had Amazon put a note on his account not to give out his details.

But that didn't help; the attacker contacted Amazon's phone support line instead, and gathered yet more information. Springer writes, "At this point, Amazon has completely betrayed my trust three times. I have done absolutely everything in my power to secure my account, but it's hopeless. I am in the process of closing my Amazon account, and migrating as much to Google services which seem significantly more robust at stopping these attacks." Springer's advice for fixing this: "Never do customer support unless the user can log in to their account. The only exception to this would be if the user forgot the password, and there should be a very strict policy." He also says email services should make aliases easier, and whois protection should be default.

5 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Google... by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He thinks Google is more secure ... ?

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    Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    1. Re:Google... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well it's more like Google does not have Customer Service...

      Well, they do, sort of.

      A while back I ordered a nexus android phone direct from google for testing. I received the phone, my credit card was charged, I paid my credit card bill, and all was good.

      About 4 months later, I decided to buy another nexus android phone direct from google. I logged in to my account and bought another phone.

      A day later I get a rejection message that my account was suspended and to contact google. I call them, speak to someone (in the USA, judging by their accent). They explain that my account was suspended for security reasons, and they are transferring the call to their "security team".

      Their "security team" is based in the Philippines, and they told me my account was suspended for suspicious activity, and to reactivate the account I needed to upload scans of my driver's license and passport, otherwise they won't reactivate my account.

      Why does google flag this as a suspicious? I have no idea. If the initial order was fraudulent, I probably would have disputed the charge on my credit card instead of paying it months ago.

      After much back & forth with their Philippines call center and being escalated, they won't budge - provide scans of my driver's license and passport, or they won't sell me a phone.

      I told them to fuck off.

  2. Does not surprise me.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back when Amazon.com had been in business for a few years I called their tech support to recover my password.

    They read the password to me over the phone. That means passwords at that time were not stored as a hash but as clear text in their database.

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    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Does not surprise me.... by rgbscan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      At the end of the 1990's I worked for one of the phone company "bells" that later became part of Verizon. At the time, customer service could pull up a webpage that had your account password as a field, but in display it was hidden with bullets (HTML input tag, type password IIRC). So all you could do was clear the field, type in a new password for the customer and click update. (The customer was then supposed to use that password to go online and change it to something else). Anyway, some technical support rep on customer service duty picking up an extra shift figured out you could just view that page's source and see the existing password in the clear, since it was the html tag obscuring it and not the database being hashed or anything. Well designed security there :-)

  3. Amazon has no idea what security is by SirDrinksAlot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Christmas before last I was the lovely new recipient of a brand new amazon account, that I didn't signup for. The problem starts with Amazon not validating email ownership and ends with Amazon not understanding how account ownership works. Some child with my same name was given a brand spanking new Fire HD for Christmas and a pile of Amazon gift certificates which they loaded up in short order, the mistake was made they maybe typoed their email address or they them self didn't understand that you don't inherently own yourname@emailprovider.com

    I tried to contact Amazon support and have them fix this problem with out ruining this kids Christmas. Amazon's response? No problem here with their processes, however I should give him my email address as far as they are concerned he owns my gmail account I've had since the closed gmail beta... After much arguing Amazon wasn't budging, I had already explained that gmail ignores dots in your address among other things, so u.ser@gmail.com u.s.e.r@gmail.com us.er@gmail.com, and user@gmail.com etc all are the same account but amazon will register individual accounts for them, my problem is I use a . in mine just for readability and spam identification and is how I have *MY* amazon account registered. Additional fun is anything after a + sign in your email gets ignored too, so you can use an email like user+is.the.CEO.of@gmail.com and it'll just send any email to that to user@gmail.com, maybe I could have used this and told them that this is not a gmail problem and they should fix it? This behavior on google's part is in my opinion: fantastic, it's an epic step on account security meaning someone else can't come along and pretend to be me just by adding or removing a dot from their email address. Blaming Google in this case was a weak attempt at avoiding responsibility.

    Long story short, Amazon didn't care that I could reset this kids password and buy whatever it is I wanted using it, as far as they were concerned this wasn't their problem. Here's amazon's official response I got before I escalated it to Jeff Bezos and spoke to the executive of customer relations (this is a thing by the way, anyone can do this)

    "Unfortunately, this is an issue that will need to be resolved by Google. We would normally be able to temporarily disable your account in order to sort out the email issues, as these issues can be caused by typos on another person's side. However, as this is not an email typo issue, we will not be able to resolve this issue ourselves. Samantha L"

    I would really like to know beyond handing over my account, what they think Google is going to do about it?