08/31 - Laundry Saturday

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news...-malicious-phishing-link-311-911/74506791007/

The first paragraph of the article specifically says that the hack was an unrelated target of opportunity.

 

I have been on the phone with amazon many times over the last week and finally got through to someone in Amazon Pay yesterday. I asked her every question I could think of and she did not have any answers for me. Just submitted yet another ticket to mturk. I told her Mturk has emailed me several times stating it’s not an mturk problem, they claim my mturk account is in good standing. She admitted Amazon Pay is aware of the issue but they don’t know what to do about it — just kept saying it’s something mturk is going to have to fix.

I asked her if the people that got their payment account suspended need to set up a new account and she said “no, that won’t solve it.”

Today I wake up from an email from Amazon Pay telling me to make a new payment account. I will NOT being do that because I’ve seen several people say that they did and their accounts got banned. What a clusterf*ck!

 

Appreciate the share, thanks!

 

I posted the literal cause above.

See https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/tech-analysis-kernel-access-security-architecture/ for a good read.

I think a plausible explanation of what's happening here isn't that scammers are trying to access our bank accounts, but potentially use SSNs and DOBs to try to create new AMT accounts, to then bypass regional checks and scam on the platform.

Of course everything's pure speculation since there's zero information coming out of Amazon.

It's possible mturk was just the canary, given the downdetector page.

 

I think that every time a hits get accepted, the mturk server pings the payments serer to check for account status. somehow in my mind the 503 errors we were getting probably affected the ping between servers which resulted on multiple request trying to validate whatever info before the hit gets accepted, and the failed request probably tripped something up. I feel that the massive Tuesday outage was an attempt to fix it, but it didn't work, and are probably planning something else but they have to be sure since they cannot try a larger scale fix without being sure that it will actually help, otherwise is just another lost day for users, and maybe some profits for them. If this wasn't an issue with the payments side, think they would have done something about it already, but since it is also the side of their business that receives the money, then they don't want to touch it. We are just unlucky that Mturk is just the dregs of the amazon conglomerate.

 

That's an interesting thought.

I have noticed that since the suspensions started that mturk isn't as laggy as it was before, and I'm not getting any of those weird captcha pages anymore either (the ones that look like they're for the amz shopping site).

 

Did Amazon ever release a statement about the mass platform outage the other day? Hundreds, if not thousands of accounts compromised and not one word from Amazon. I'm a bit surprised the media isn't already on this. Maybe they need phone calls.

 

on https://payments.amazon.com/aes/bam#/aes/list

I logged into my amazon payments account by finding amazon payments on google. I didn't remember if I ever even had an account there. I logged in there. then I clicked on account overview, then on bank account management. this error message appeared -

Unexpected error occurred. Please click here and verify if you have completed all onboarding steps.

 

after the steps I did above, I clicked the "here" link. it went to a page that says this @Fearless Turtle

--------------------------------

Your Amazon Payments account could not be created.

Unfortunately, you are not eligible for an Amazon Payments account. Click here to go to the home page.

-----------------------

has anyone else seen a message that you are actually "not eligible" for an amazon payments account?

 

So I'm still able to turk for now... However I am looking into the problems everyone has been having too. I haven't really found anything you guys don't already know but If there's anything I can do or if you guys need help with something, let me know. All these issues that have popped up really sucks.

 

funny how you always want what you can't have

normally mturk wouldn't be on my mind at all on a weekend let alone a holiday weekend

 

as aren't most hacks? my point is the mayor did his best to deny it, until he couldn't. as amazon seems to be doing

 

It wasn't a hack, it was bad/lazy programming.
From Wikipedia (using that because it's more concise than the news articles):
On 19 July 2024, CrowdStrike released a software configuration file update to the Falcon endpoint detection and response agent. Flaws in the update caused blue screens of death on Microsoft Windows machines, disrupting millions of Windows computers worldwide.[58][59] Affected machines were forced into a bootloop, making them unusable. This was caused by an update to a configuration file, Channel File 291, which CrowdStrike says triggered a logic error and caused the operating system to crash.[60] The downtime caused a widespread global impact, grounding commercial airline flights, temporarily taking Sky News and other broadcasters offline, and disrupting banking and healthcare services as well as 911 emergency call centers.[8][61]

 

They weren't hacked, they just could not boot their computers. If your computer won't boot, you can't be hacked...

 

we must be talking about two different things. the columbus hack wasn't thought to be assciated with the crowdstrike hack. they just happened around the same time. people have already lost money like paychecks in the columbus hack. haven't heard about money disappearing in the crowdstrike one like paychecks.

 

@turker have you raised your Connect score at all?

 

My reply from Mturk:

 

no. I was sort of thinking I might want to get rid of the internet. I don't have any social media pages anymore. except 1 that was hacked and now it just always says all this stuff about Asian pharmacies and I don't know how to get rid of the account lol. my only real tie to the internet is mturk and here.

 

I forgot to add I’ve been emailing that email address they gave me daily since I got suspended with no response.