Amazon Prime Video’s Streaming Patterns Stored on an Internal Server Accidentally Disclosed to Public
A web browser-enabled database on an internal Amazon server that contained information about Amazon Prime Video members’ watching patterns was accidentally made available online.
By inadvertently, a web browser-enabled database on an internal Amazon server that contained information about users’ viewing patterns for Amazon Prime Video was made available online.
Information
Anurag Sen, a cyber-security expert, discovered an online database of Amazon Prime viewers’ viewing preferences that was kept on a company server.
According to search engine Shodan, the database was originally discovered to be online on September 30, according to Tech Crunch.
Adam Montgomery’s Statement to Tech Crunch
“But because the database was not protected with a password, the data within could be accessed by anyone with a web browser just by knowing its IP address,” the report noted.
The database had over 215 million records of viewing information, including the title of the streaming show or movie, the device on which it was viewed, and other internal information.
Later, the Amazon Prime Video database was taken off the web.
An Amazon spokesperson told Tech Crunch that there was a “deployment error with a Prime Video analytics server”.
“This problem has been resolved and no account information (including login or payment details) were exposed. This was not an AWS issue; AWS is secure by default and performed as designed,” the spokesperson added.
Viewership on Prime Video
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power had the largest premiere in Prime Video history, drawing more than 25 million viewers worldwide on its first day, according to the company’s most recent Q3 earnings call, and has garnered close to 100 million viewers overall.
With more than 15 million viewers for the first game, it also launched the first season of Prime Video as the exclusive home of NFL Thursday Night Football.
Data Breach Issues
Misconfigurations of the cloud are nothing new, and academics have been cautioning about them for years as a key source of data breaches. In fact, a 2021 IBM analysis stated that IT teams’ failure to adequately protect the assets contained within their cloud infrastructure is to blame for 19% of data breaches.
For the analysis, the company surveyed more than 500 organisations that had experienced a data breach, and discovered that, for half (52%), protecting data housed on the public cloud was still a problem.
