Toward the end of October 2020, an unknown number of Amazon customers received an email stating that their email address had been “disclosed by an Amazon employee to a third-party.” Amazon said that the “employee” had been fired — but the story changed slightly later on, according to a statement shared by Motherboard which referred to multiple “individuals” and “bad actors.”
So how many customers were affected? What motivated the leakers? We still don’t know. But this isn’t the first time that the tech giant’s own employees have leaked customer data. Amazon sent out a near-identical batch of emails in January 2020 and November 2018.
If there’s evidence of systemic insider exfiltration of customer data at Amazon, this must be tackled via internal security controls.
