Inside Job: Amazon.com Employee Stole Credit Data of 106 Million

Amazon.com is rotten to its core. This latest case of "employee gone bad" (https://heavy.com/news/2019/07/paige-adele-thompson/) is yet another example of the widespread patterns of misbehavior, misconduct and mismanagement by Amazon.com employees that have been ongoing for the better part of two decades. From alleged money laundering to racketeering to computer fraud, the culture of misconduct and malfeasance starts at the top with the win-at-any cost disruptor model espoused by Amazon.com executives. A few examples for reference:

Misconduct stemming from office of the CEO: In 2013, dozens of Amazon.com employees and the CEO's own wife were caught flooding Brad Stone's book, The Everything Store, with unfavorable reviews to keep the book from damaging the reputation of Amazon.com and its CEO. (http://readindies.blogspot.com/2016/08/amazons-blackened-soul.html)

Misconduct organized and ordered by executives: In 2018, at least 50 Amazon employees were caught creating fake accounts on Ebay and accused of multiple federal crimes, including criminal conspiracy, fraud and racketeering. (http://robertstanek.blogspot.com/2019/08/amazon-employees-caught-creating-fake-accounts.html)

Misconduct organized and ordered by executives: In 2019, Amazon.com was caught in a highly unethical and likely criminal pay-for-praise scheme involving several hundred employees. (http://robertstanek.blogspot.com/2019/08/amazon-caught-in-pay-for-praise-scheme.html)

Although the SEC, FTC and DOJ are all circling Amazon.com with possible intent to act, the federal crimes, misdeeds and abuses of Amazon.com executives and employees have so far carried on with impunity—more likely due to the deep (dare I say, cozy) relationships Amazon.com has with the Justice Department, U.S. Intelligence and hundreds of other government agencies than a lack of evidence. However, with the deepest secrets of our government, including the Sensitive, Secret and Top Secret information of the Justice Department (https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/justice-and-public-safety/) , U.S. Intelligence (https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/)and more (https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/defense/), hosted on Amazon’s cloud servers, this latest case of "employee gone bad" is likely too hard to overlook.

To wit, the Amazon.com employee involved in the theft of the credit data of over 100 million people did so by using the knowledge gained working in Amazon’s Web Services division as a software engineer to hack into the data Capital One stored on Amazon’s servers. This data was stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, also referred to as Amazon S3, which is a service offered by Amazon Web Services to supposedly securely store the data of thousands of companies. Care to guess where many of the deepest secrets of the Justice Department, U.S. Intelligence and hundreds of other U.S. agencies are stored? Yep, Amazon S3.

While Capital One, like Amazon.com, largely downplayed the extent of the damage done in the data breach, the estimated dollar cost of the damages, as stated by Capital One itself, are telling: $100 to $150 million in damages. (https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/paige-thompson-capital-one-hack-former-amazon-engineer-social-security-numbers.html). Most troubling about all this? The (technically "former") Amazon.com employee involved used knowledge and skills gained from 2015 – 2016 to hack the Capital One data stored on Amazon’s S3 servers in 2019. This was an inside job. Amazon Web Services tactics, techniques and security surely should have changed considerably in 3 years—however, clearly they had not. Sort of like the lengthy Amazon Web Services S3 outage on February 28, 2017 that was so bad Amazon couldn’t even get into its own servers to warn anyone—a problem that occurred because of gross mismanagement involving Amazon Web Services procedures and tactics. Other examples of gross mismanagement? How about:

* the days’ long outage in April 2011 that Amazon didn’t make a public statement about for a week,

* the infamous Friday the 13th outage of September 2013 that left regional customers without service for several hours due to a simple load balancing misconfiguration,

* the lengthy Amazon Web Services S3 outage in November 2014 because of the failure of the AWS CloudFront DNS server,

*  or the 10-hour outage in June 2016 due to stormy weather that hit numerous prime websites and businesses.

As I stated previously, the culture of misconduct and malfeasance starts at the top of the company while the patterns of misbehavior, misconduct and mismanagement extend throughout the entire organization. More examples of mismanagement and failure of Amazon Web Services:

2017 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/03/02/aws-outage-that-broke-the-internet-caused-by-mistyped-command

2017 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/equinix-power-outage-one-reason-behind-aws-cloud-disruption

2015 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/09/24/heres-what-caused-sundays-amazon-cloud-outage

2015 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/09/21/amazon-data-center-outage-affects-netflix-heroku-others

2013 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/09/13/network-issues-cause-amazon-cloud-outage

2012 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/27/cascading-failures-caused-amazon-outage

2012 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/07/03/multiple-generator-failures-caused-amazon-outage

2012 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/30/amazon-data-center-loses-power-during-storm

2012 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/06/29/another-outage-amazon-cloud

2011 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/08/15/amazon-provides-more-details-on-dublin-outage

2011 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/29/amazon-networking-error-caused-cloud-outage

2011 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/21/major-amazon-outage-ripples-across-web

2010 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/12/13/amazon-hardware-failures-caused-outage

2009 - https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/19/outage-for-amazon-web-services

With this much going wrong and the regulatory hammer looming, is there any wonder why there is an outflow of executives, including Zumwalt, Blackburn, Wilson, Jain, and Chew for starters. In his new book, Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about Harry Markopolos, the guy who gift-wrapped and delivered the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme to the SEC. Much like the case of Amazon.com, federal regulators spent years ignoring Markopolos and what was plain to see before their eyes. They couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation. Like Harry Markopolos told Malcolm Gladwell: "the truth is in the math"; "people have too much faith in large organizations"; "the emperor has no clothes".

The truth of Amazon.com is in the math too—in the patterns of misconduct and malfeasance that start at the top of the company. Indeed, the emperor has no clothes, and that’s something I have said before as well.

Circling back, bottom line, this person worked for Amazon S3 as a software engineer, subsequently hacked Amazon S3 and did so using intimate first-hand knowledge gained while employed at Amazon S3. This intimate first-hand knowledge included information about possible vulnerabilities, how those vulnerabilities potentially could be exploited and exactly how Amazon S3 worked. As a former Amazon S3 software engineer, this person knew exactly what to do and where to go once she got into Amazon S3. So let's call this hack what it was: An inside job. If Amazon.com were a bank and a former teller knew the contents of the bank vault and then robbed safety deposit boxes 7, 17 and 73 of their contents, everyone would call this what it was: an inside job. Well, that’s exactly what happened. This was an inside job. This former employee knew exactly the vulnerabilities to look for, how they could be exploited and which deposit boxes to steal—and she learned it all while working at Amazon S3.

Thanks for reading, I’m William Robert Stanek, Microsoft’s #1 author for nearly 20 years, and author of over 250 topselling books.

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Addendum: Interesting comments earlier on Facebook and in private regarding said employee's role at Amazon.

As explained in the article, this person was employed by Amazon as a software engineer for S3 from 2015-2016. The Capital One data was stolen from Amazon's S3 servers in 2019. This was done using insider knowledge and tactics gained while working for Amazon. Amazon and Capital One both have underplayed how damaging this whole thing was... though Capital One admits this is likely to cause the company $100 - $150 million in damages.


P.S> This case gets curiouser and curiouser when you dig below the surface. Basically, the "employee" did the crime then gift-wrapped herself for authorities by not only giving them a trail of breadcrumbs to follow but copping to the crime on social media. This ensured quick arrest and abrupt ends to certain internal investigations (and primarily at Amazon.com). Inquiring minds might want to hazard a few guesses why. Two obvious questions for starters: What else might have been uncovered with continued, deep investigation? Who else might have been uncovered? I’m sure the curious can discern others.

Amazon Reviews: Broken System

Between 1 in 3 and 2 in 3 product reviews on Amazon.com are fake. They are bought and paid for. They are written by friends and family. They are swapped and traded on Facebook. They are incentivized from readers. Talking about this problem as I have for nearly 2 decades now has made me the repeat target of the thousands who make their living writing reviews, the millions of sellers who benefit from the fake praise and the dozens of Amazon employees working the system for personal and/or professional benefit.

Having reported problems with reviews to Amazon over many years and received repeated, direct retaliation from Amazon employees for doing so, I learned the hard way about the active involvement of Amazon employees in Amazon’s own marketplace, whether to ensure the success of themselves, family or associates or simply to ensure the failure of particular targets. This occurring repeatedly despite state and federal laws protecting those who report criminal activity, corporate malfeasance and other corporate wrongdoings from retaliation by those they are reporting.

Letters and emails to Amazon executives were answered with retaliation, as were letters and emails written to Amazon’s own legal team. This occurred because of the hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce that flow through Amazon annually. This occurred because those who rock the boat are targeted and thrown overboard. This occurred because of Amazon’s deep ties with local, state and federal government. This occurred because Amazon's executives buy entire newsrooms. This occurred because the truth could utterly destroy Amazon's marketplace dominance.

With control within the government and within the media, Amazon knows it has little to fear. Maybe a decade or so from now they’ll get a fine with a slap on the wrist despite ongoing, widespread corruption and corporate malfeasance. How quaint of them to recently throw their hands up in the air and declare they can no longer guarantee their marketplace. Meanwhile their own employees have steered billions in sales from one direction into another, harmed the sales of this product to ensure the success of that and more. Meanwhile Amazon employees have enriched themselves, their families, their friends, their associates. Meanwhile their executives have become billionaires by ensuring not even the truth affects the flow of commerce across their server engines.

If you know me, you know I’ve written many times about this problem, this widespread corruption. You know Amazon has targeted my books repeatedly because I’ve spoken out, because I’ve complained about my books being bombarded with unfavorable reviews by unscrupulous competitors, because I’ve let others know that Amazon itself was part of the problem. Speaking out about this problem has cost me millions of sales and tens of millions in earnings—and yet I will continue to speak out. I will not be silenced by Amazon’s continued heavy-handed retaliation or the criminal actions of its employees or others.

For those who don’t know me, please do take the time to read the numerous articles I’ve written about this problem. You’ll find the articles here at Linkedin, in my personal blogs (http://robertstanek.blogspot.com/ and http://williamstanek.blogspot.com), at Go Indie (http://readindies.blogspot.com/) and on my websites (http://www.williamrstanek.com and http://www.robert-stanek.com/). You’ll find posts about this problem going back to 2003 here @ http://www.robertstanek.com/rsblog.htm. I do of course write as William Stanek, Robert Stanek, William R. Stanek and William Robert Stanek.

Thanks for reading, I’m William Robert Stanek, Microsoft’s #1 author for nearly 20 years, and author of over 250 topselling books.

Amazon Fraud Again: Amazon Employees Caught Creating Fake Ebay Seller Accounts

In 2018, at least 50 Amazon employees were caught red handed creating fake accounts on Ebay and accused of multiple federal crimes, including criminal conspiracy, fraud and racketeering. Over a period of years, the Amazon employees had created hundreds—if not thousands—of fake seller accounts to lure sellers away from Ebay’s marketplace. The Amazon employees were caught after a months’ long investigation and sting operation designed to catch Amazon in the act of setting up the fake accounts with the intention of luring sellers to Amazon’s marketplace—and away from Ebay.

Over the many years Amazon employees operated as fake sellers on Ebay, they redirected thousands of sellers to Amazon, redirecting tens—if not hundreds—of millions of dollars in sales to Amazon. You might imagine when this extensive level of corporate malfeasance is uncovered there’d be explosive media coverage and damaging headlines. Yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find coverage of these happenings anywhere. (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ebay-accuses-amazon-of-poaching-sellers-from-its-site/.)

Amazon successfully buried the bad press, ensured what little press coverage there was appeared deep in the news, and leveraged its power and influence to push the crimes out of federal courts and into resolution via arbitration, thereby ensuring the federal crimes of its employees were swept under the rug. Amazon gets away with decades of corporate malfeasance, federal crimes, abusive practices and more by publicly claiming to be a marketplace disruptor. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the company has tight controls throughout the United States over police forces and news rooms, and works over time to manage public perception, to spin reality, and perform damage control whenever it is caught in the act. Amazon does this all while laughing at the FTC, DOJ and other federal agencies investigating the company for antitrust and numerous other issues.

Sound Orwellian, like something out of the novel 1984? Not at all, through its Ring division Amazon has deep connections with police forces across the country—countless of which are indebted to the company for helping them solve crimes. Amazon in fact requires police forces to shill it’s surveillance cameras using secret agreements and private kickback arrangements in the guise of donations. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb88za/amazon-requires-police-to-shill-surveillance-cameras-in-secret-agreement

Amazon has control over news rooms through its CEO’s purchase of The Washington Post. Control over the DC-based Post, not only provides Amazon with access to news rooms and reporters around the world, it also provides Amazon with access to and influence over federal agencies and the White House. Look any day at the press list for the White House and you’ll see how this is managed. When Bezos/Amazon want a story gone or buried, it’s a done deal. Case in point this story of widespread corporate malfeasance and federal crimes which was white-washed from existence. Crimes that should have included criminal conspiracy, fraud and racketeering--just for starters.

Amazon’s deep relations with federal, state and local government ensures many of the company’s other federal crimes, misdeeds and abuses have never seen the light of day. How deeply is Amazon embedded into the United States government? So much so that you’ll find dedicated recruitment pages for federal, government, and state agencies (including https://aws.amazon.com/federal/ and https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/government/), the Department of Defense (https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/defense/), U.S. Intelligence (https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/), Justice Department (https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/justice-and-public-safety/), and on and on. Amazon’s own words are telling: With over 2,000 government agencies using Amazon Web Services (AWS), we understand the requirements U.S. Government agencies… AWS provides cloud capability across all classification levels Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.

Amazon is so embedded into our government that it is impossible to perform any fair or just oversight of the company. All those government agencies working with Amazon are handled with close (dare I say, cozy) relationships between many employees of Amazon and many employees of the government agencies. Those cozy relationships exist at all levels from the executive down. With such close ties to the DOD, DOJ, US Intelligence and hundreds of other agencies, is it any wonder Amazon can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Not to mention the fact that not only does one of the most corrupt corporations in the world have ties into every branch of state, local and federal government throughout the United States, that same corrupt corporation holds the most sensitive data and secrets of the United States on its servers and by holding that data, ensures it will never have a judgement day.

Control the police, control the media, control the federal government. What’s next for future President Bezos? Oh wait, with those controls Bezos doesn’t need to be president to run the country, does he. He just needs to remember which puppet strings to pull when. Is there any question now why the Amazon monopoly continues unchecked?

Thanks for reading, I’m William Robert Stanek, Microsoft’s #1 author for nearly 20 years, and author of over 250 topselling books.

Shame on Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)

Beware those who do evil in the name of good, those who build bully pulpits so they can target and victimize. I wish I was talking about some totalitarian regime or corrupt corporation, instead I’m talking about Absolute Write run by Victoria Strauss and others. Absolute Write is a platform for hate and abuse created by those claiming to do good for the writing community. A platform for hate and abuse that claims affiliation with Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) to extend the reach of its harm, victimization and abuse.

For a number of years Absolute Write members and leaders indiscriminately targeted self-publishers as frauds, while membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America looked on and nodded their heads in agreement.

For a number of years Absolute Write members and leaders indiscriminately targeted those who used print on demand as frauds, while membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America looked on and nodded their heads in agreement.

For a number of years Absolute Write members and leaders indiscriminately targeted kindle authors as frauds, while membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America looked on and nodded their heads in agreement.

The list goes on and on and on… of alleged frauds, supposed wrongdoers, ne’er-do-wells. And so it has gone on for decades, with anyone who did anything this group from their holier-than-though bully pulpit disagreed with being targeted as frauds, while with the Science Fiction Writers of America has looked on and allowed continued widespread victimization and abuse.

Beware those who do evil in the name of good, those who build bully pulpits to target and victimize. Absolute Write and those who hide behind its claims of helping the writing community have done evil in the name of good for decades. Hate speech they’ve inspired is all over the internet. The animosity they’ve created runs deep. The hundreds of victims they’ve targeted have little recourse against the lynch mobs they’ve created, complete with public hangings and brandings all done in the name of doing good while doing evil.

In truth, the crimes of these hundreds of victims largely come down to simply having crossed paths with this group of writers who use their public forum to target, harass and harangue anyone for anything. Intolerance, cruelty, xenophobia, more, all run rampant in themes and subthemes, in private chats between members, all while the Science Fiction Writers of America looks on.

I was first targeted by Absolute Write members (Victoria Strauss, David Langford and others) in 2002. At the time, Victoria Strauss was an aspiring young adult writer with no status except for the platform of hate and intolerance she and others were building. My young adult book, Keeper Martin’s Tale, was a self-published, upstart success that was immediately targeted by this group and their ilk.

I’ve written much about this. You’ll find articles at Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamstanek/), in my personal blogs (http://robertstanek.blogspot.com/ and http://williamstanek.blogspot.com), at Go Indie (http://readindies.blogspot.com/) and on my websites (http://www.williamrstanek.com and http://www.robert-stanek.com/). You’ll find posts about related problems going back to 2003 here @ http://www.robertstanek.com/rsblog.htm. I do of course write as William Stanek, Robert Stanek, William R. Stanek and William Robert Stanek. I am of course the author of over 200 full-length works of fiction and nonfiction, having been a successful published author since 1995.

In these posts and articles, you’ll learn about the third review ever for the Young Adult book that competed with Victoria Strauss’s desires to be a writer, Keeper Martin’s Tale. The reader, using a fake account and fake name, said they had been duped/had by all the glowing reviews. Meanwhile, Keeper Matin’s Tale had exactly TWO previous reviews over a period of several months while it topped the Top 50 Scifi & Fantasy Bestseller list at Amazon.com and after selling thousands upon thousands of copies.

The second ever review for another of my books, Elf Queen’s Quest, was much the same, about how the reader was duped/had by all the glowing reviews—of which there was exactly ONE previous review. This reader also used a fake account and fake name.

This continued. All orchestrated by persons associated with Langford, Strauss and Absolute Write.

Odd articles appeared in Langford’s Ancible about how I was a supposed fraud, about how all the reviews were fake. This being 2002, my fiction works had sold thousands upon thousands of copies, and the total number of reviews was a mere handful—single digits on average across all my fiction titles. That didn’t stop the fake outrage reviews from flowing from associates of these persons, who liberally dumped 1 and 2 star reviews using fake accounts and fake names.

Langford, Strauss and Absolute Write next began targeting Reagent Press (2002/2003) claiming it was a fraudulent publisher. The earliest claim being because Reagent Press paid its writers using Paypal. Persons associated with Absolute Write then began targeting Reagent Press as well as myself.

And guess what? While these persons were decrying Reagent Press as a fraud for paying writers via Paypal, Strauss and associates were praising a newly forming company called Smashwords, which guess what? Planned to, and eventually did, pay its writers via Paypal.

That’s kind of a running theme of how all this works with these persons. Something that competes or perhaps has an original idea or theme that others want to use for their own is a fraud. Themes, characters, plots and more were in fact liberally plagiarized from my fiction books while these persons were indiscriminately targeting me, Reagent Press and my works of fictions.

Beware those who do evil in the name of good, those who build bully pulpits to target and victimize. Absolute Write have not only used their bully pulpit to harass and abuse, they’ve used it to suppress and censor, to ensure when they’ve stolen intellectual property or done incredible harm the victims of their crimes and misdeeds are instead victimized, harassed and maligned.

In 2002 when all this started, it’s important to note that I was a highly successful best-selling author with millions of readers for the dozens of professionally published books I’d written. I’d been a successful author since my breakout first book in 1995. The individuals involved absolutely knew this and yet they have continued to malign, defame, harass and attack me publicly for nearly 2 decades. They do this because they are insulated by dozens, if not hundreds, of like-mind persons who use the platform for hate they’ve created to take down anyone who gets in their way for any reason. Continued claims of affiliation with Science Fiction Writers of America also lends credibility to the victimization of their targets.

Over the past 2 decades, these persons have proven they’ll do whatever it takes to cause harm, to abuse and victimize, regardless of who else gets caught in their cross hairs. Some years ago, they published my home address “so that [me] personally and [my] family are physically targeted”. Apparently it wasn’t enough to smear, defame, and harass online, they also need the fight to become physical. This resulted in my daughters, ~10 and ~11 at the time, being physically accosted. Stop and think about that for a moment. They knew I had children. I have pictures of them in my accounts. And they wanted people to target them physically.

When I wrote about my children being accosted because of what they’d done, the response and comments? Strauss and others thought it was absolutely hilarious, stating that “my daughters deserved [to have been attacked] because their dad was a fraudulent self-publisher.” My crime: Yep, self-publishing novels of YA and children’s fiction.

I’ve written about all this before, I’ve named those involved, and yet the nonsense continues, nearly 2 decades on. More examples: When these persons learned I wrote a book about my military service. What did they do? They spread falsities that I wasn’t a combat veteran and that my claim to have been awarded the distinguished flying cross was stolen valor.

These persons urged others to spread this. Some asked others to “ensure [I] received threats so [I] would learn [my] lesson”. Others asked “circulate [his] address again, make sure he gets a personal visit [at my home]”. “Stomp some sense into him,” said another. Stop and think about that for a moment. These people were asking others to assault me at my home for the alleged crime of stolen valor that they knew was false because they’d made it up. These are the lengths these persons will go to abuse and victimize anyone who gets in their way for any reason.

Thanks for reading.