What Is Amazon Photos? Amazon Photos is a secure online storage service for your photos and videos.Įvery Amazon customer gets 5 GB of free storage to save, share, and access their photos on desktop, mobile, and tablet.Īmazon Prime members receive unlimited photo storage. I guess the first question before starting the steps is What is Amazon Photos. Time to learn where to access Amazon Photos. Now that I found this piece of knowledge, I wanted to share it with you. Since I don’t use the photo service from Amazon that often (or at all), I needed to find it so I could manage my pics. This brought up the question of where I could find my pictures. Then I remembered I also set up Amazon to backup my images/videos. But when it let me know it was backed up, it got me thinking where else my photos were going. “In an era where we all blindly trust our technology suppliers and gladly store all our private and most coveted secrets on someone’s cloud, a reminder is necessary that these incidents might happen even to the best (Amazon.Last week I was taking pictures with my new phone (yes, I’m still bragging about my new phone □ ) when it gave me a notice that said, “Photos are backed up.” Since I am a Google user, I never really pay attention to the notices because they are always backed up to Google Photos. Erez Yalon, vice president of security research at Checkmarx, reflected on the implications, in a statement to Threatpost via email: The real scope could be quite a bit greater. It’s unclear just how many apps could’ve been targeted with such loose access tokens, as only a small number of Amazon APIs were analyzed for the report. A malicious actor would simply need to read, encrypt, and re-write the customer’s files while erasing their history.” There are any number of ways in which an attacker could’ve leveraged unsecured access tokens.įor example, with a malicious third-party app installed on the victim’s phone, they could’ve redirected the token in a way “that effectively launches the vulnerable activity and triggers the request to be sent to a server controlled by the attacker.” From there, the attacker could have accessed all kinds of personal information a victim had stored in Amazon Photos.īecause the tokens also leaked to Amazon Drive, attackers could’ve found, read, or even unrecoverably deleted files and folders in a victim’s Drive account.Īnd “with all these options available for an attacker,” the researchers speculated, “a ransomware scenario was easy to come up with as a likely attack vector. In addition to third-party applications, the same unsecure token was also shared with Amazon Drive – used for file storage and sharing. ![]() “You can think of it as the password being sent to other apps in plaintext.” Whenever this activity is launched, it triggers an HTTP request that carries a header with the customer’s access token.” In a video explainer, they put it in simpler terms: In their report, researchers from Checkmarx described how access tokens naturally leaked through an Amazon application programming interface (API) through “a misconfiguration of the comamazongallerythorappactivityThorViewActivity component, which is implicitly exported in the app’s manifest file” – manifest files describe critical application information to the Android OS and Google Play store – “thus allowing external applications to access it. It’s convenient for users, but also, potentially, for attackers. To authenticate users across various apps within their ecosystem, like other software suite vendors, Amazon uses access tokens. ![]() On December 18th, Amazon announced that the issues had been fully resolved. ![]() The findings were first reported to Amazon’s Vulnerability Research Program on November 7th of last year. They also could have performed a ransomware attack, locking up or permanently deleting photos, documents and more. Theoretically, with exposed tokens, an attacker could’ve accessed users’ personal data from a number of different Amazon apps – not just Photos but also, for example, Amazon Drive. The Amazon Photos app for Android insufficiently protected user access tokens, according to a blog post published on Wednesday.
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