Malware scare on Amazon.in

Amazon India, the Indian arm of the world’s biggest e-commerce player has certainly been making all the right moves and a few months ago reportedly hit the $200 million mark in sales and could hit the $1 billion number by March 2016.

Amazon India sells 15 million products across 20 product categories, which makes Amazon bigger in terms of products on offer than competitors Flipkart as well as Snapdeal.

Clearly, Amazon India is expanding at breakneck speed and one of the ways the company is doing it is by reducing the time between merchant registration and listing the first product, with Amazon India almost 2-3 weeks quicker than competition.

Now, this focus on speed may be coming back to bite Amazon on its backside. Because at least on one vendor’s product pages, dangerous malware has been detected by Google.

Yesterday, I was purchasing a product on Amazon.in, when I clicked on some other products by the same vendor and to my horror saw Google browser Chrome warning me on some product pages with a message stating that Google Chrome had blocked access to the page on www.amazon.in. The warning further said that “content from s.m2pub.com, a known malware distributor” had been inserted into the Amazon.in webpage, and that visiting the page was likely to infect my computer with malware.

I wrote to Amazon India asking for a comment. Amazon India’s first response was to point a finger back at me, saying that it could mean that my computer was infected. I wrote back explaining that I hadn’t got pop-up ads whenever I opened a new tab (a clear sign of my computer being infected), but had got an unambiguous message from Google Chrome warning me that certain webpages on Amazon.in were infected with malware.

Later an Amazon India spokesperson admitted the problem, though still claiming it was just a misconfiguration error. “We were made aware of the issue through a few customers. On review we found there to be a misconfiguration in a third party vendor code. We have since rectified it,” the Amazon India spokesperson said. Most likely, images, etc, uploaded by the third party vendor may have contained this malware and if true may indicate that Amazon’s security didn’t work as it should.

When it comes to online shopping, reputation is everything and Amazon certainly knows that. And once a user comes across malware warnings, he would also be wary of other Amazon features such as the one where your credit card details are stored for easier purchase the next time. We’ve all seen what happened to retailer Target after a breach, with the after effects claiming the Target CEO himself.

Ebay is another recent example after intruders managed to access its database. In fact, though Ebay India would not admit it, immediately after the attack even the Ebay India website was going slow on transactions and cancelling many transactions even after payment.

And while the Target and Ebay breaches have to do with the wealth of data stored on their servers, malware through webpages is one route to infiltrate inside corporate systems.

Amazon India needs to be careful. If it sacrifices security for speed, the price it pays could be very heavy and all its mega growth plans may just remain that–mere plans on paper