Amazon to compensate hacked users

Online retailer Amazon China told the Global Times Thursday that the firm will give compensation to Chinese users whose accounts have been hacked.

A technical team of the company is investigating the hacked accounts and the company will compensate users who have lost money due to the hacking, the firm said in an e-mail to the Global Times Thursday.

"Amazon highly values the security of customers' information and will not leak their personal data under any circumstances," the company added.

Yang Miao, an editor of Business Value magazine, wrote on his Sina Weibo Wednesday that when he found his Amazon account was hacked on August 31, he reported the case to the company, but received no response for five days.

He was told by an Amazon customer service representative Wednesday Amazon's many accounts have been hacked since last week and he is the fifth person to report the problem to him, he wrote.

"Some Web users have low awareness of protecting their online personal information and are amenable to paying bills on some fake payment sites which will remember their bank account number and security code," a network security engineer surnamed Wang told the Global Times Thursday.

However, Su Huiyan, an e-commerce analyst at Internet consulting firm iResearch, noted that China's online companies should strengthen their security technology to protect their consumers' accounts, as Amazon is not the first one to be hacked.

The online software developer network CSDN was hacked in 2010, leading to a personal data leak of 6 million members. And online retailer 360buy.com got hacked in 2011.

"These online retailers could learn from China's leading Internet service provider Tencent which has plugged in some security warning functions in its chat platform Tencent QQ, warning the users to be cautious when their chat contents involve money," Su said.

Wang Xu, a lawyer with Beijing-based Lantern Law Firm, said that at present it will be hard for an affected consumer to file a lawsuit due to the difficulty in providing evidence if hackers have stolen information about an online account on an e-commerce website.