I was thinking of opening an Amazon affiliate account soon.
However, when looking up how well kept the privacy is with these links, it's pretty strange how I find very little to no information.
If anybody here knows how Amazon affiliate links work, could you tell me if it'd be possible to decrypt the affiliate links (or through some other means) somehow and access account information?
If someone really wanted to, would they be able to get any information about me through my Amazon affiliate links?
Thank you.
Well, firstly you should use an Amazon Business account for this, so you would already have your data separated out from truly private information.
But the core of this question is if Amazon is going to expose or fail to secure your data. I personally don't feel that Amazon is going to be the weak point in securing your personal information.
From just a user perspective without malicious intent, you really don't get any information about the affiliate link you're using.
With a storefront, you give out some more information, but still only what you choose and no addresses or phone numbers, or any PII like that.
As a Developer, I don't know of nor could I find any endpoints that would let me look at other affiliates' information, and I am sure there are none
Related
I have multiple products on Amazon that are being purchased. What I would like to find out is how the buyer found the item on Amazon. Did the buyer search on Amazon? Did the buyer follow a link from a Facebook Post or Tweet?
Is there anyway to retrieve this or any similar information? I don't care if it's from Reports, the MWS API, or anywhere else.
I found an article from 2012 that claims this functionality wasn't available at that time. But perhaps things have changed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/01/11/amazon-should-give-self-publishers-more-data/#5b1bf155368e
Amazon has no control over how someone may access a particular page. This is more or less inherent in the nature of the internet, where from any location, you can link directly to a website. Furthermore, your browser doesn't 'pass forward' so to speak your browsing history to the Amazon, so it would have no data to record in this regard.
There are certainly methods of tracking this, for instance, if you have a special link that is ONLY posted on facebook, and the link simply records the click, and forwards you to the actual listing, but that would require controlled dissemination of website links, which is basically impossible.
So.. to answer your question, it is theoretically possible, and exceedingly improbably that this information is available.
There are a few sites out there, mint.com, swipely.com, blippy.com, that have total access to your banking and credit information. You need to give them your userid and password. Once they have that, they are able to access all of your purchase history.
My question: How is this done? Is this a service being provided by the banks? Are they simply logging into your banks web site and scrubbing the pages? Is there a company that provides these tools or does each of these sites write the code in house?
If anyone has some knowledge they are willing to share, it would be greatly appreciated.
I think it may have changed since the takeover by Intuit, but certainly before that Mint used Yodlee to obtain this information.
As I understand it, Yodlee uses OFX for communicating with financial institutions, but also does some screen scraping.
See here for further info.
I am working in PHP on a Linux server with MySQL.
I have a requirement (that I have attempted to talk them out of) to collect credit card information from users so that our company can use the card numbers to hold hotel rooms for a conference. We will not be charging the cards ourselves at all, but instead just sending them to the hotel. I then need to be able to download a CSV file and each time someone signs up an email to go to the admin with all the information.
I tried to explain that this wasn't secure, but several other developers have done this for them in the past before I was working here.
My question is; is there anyway to make this secure? If not are there any third party options to make this happen?
EDIT:
I appreciate everyone who has posted so far, it has simply made me want to attempt to do this less and less. If you could add to your answers simple explanations, oriented at non-tech people, it would be greatly appreciated, in fact site source and links would help me a great deal. I haven't found any sites that would explain this in a non-tech way.
First of, I am not a lawyer. I have implemented CC-handling code several times previously, but I am only familiar with Danish laws and regulations, so your mileage may vary.
As far as I know, there are restrictions in place (law and regulations from the CC providers) that you need to be aware of. I don't know where you are in the world, but in many countries you need to be PCI certified to handle credit card data and that is an extremely onerous, expensive and on-going process.
Other countries, or states, may have notification rules in play that requires you to pay the cost of notifying the card holder if security is broken - and unless you are very careful, it is not unlikely.
In general, I would recommend against that procedure. You may risk being liable for any costs if it goes wrong.
It's really a bad idea to be storing card details. You're opening yourself up for a world of pain in the form of PCI-DSS audits. It is not as simple as 'use encryption', you need to have processes in place to securely manage the encryption keys, schedule key rotation, securely log access and so on and on... Storing card details is absolutely something you want to avoid.
If you have to have something in place, then the best option may be for you (as a company) to take payments from the credit cards to your own merchant account, then pay the hotels separately (from your bank account/whatever). You act as a proxy for the client making the payment to the hotel.
Most payment gateways allow you to store the card details securely, and charge at a later date (using a token id returned by the gateway), which will likely be useful here. But you wont be able to retrieve the card details to pass them through to the hotel in any way, which is why you would need to take payment, then organise a separate payment to the hotel.
Its still quite an undertaking though because a lot of areas of PCI-DSS will come into play even with this simplified solution.
You asked, so here is more information:
PCI-DSS is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It's a set of guidelines which basically apply to any company that 'touches' cardholder data, in particular the card number. Touching it literally means any handling of the data, even just having it pass through your network without it ever being persisted to disk is enough to mandate that you must comply, (though it is significantly easier if you don't persist the details to disk)
You didn't yet state which part of the world you're in, or how these card details are captured (internet/telephone/in person). These details are significant to how you can achieve compliance.
Start by taking a look at the PCI-DSS SAQ (Self Assessment Questionnaires). These SAQ's are the minimum requirements for companies that do not store cardholder details to disk, and should give a good impression of the security that needs to be in place across the network and policies that should be applied across the company.
As I said, if you're thinking of storing card details then things get more complicated, because as a general rule the SAQ is no longer good enough. You need to enrol the assistance of a QSA (Qualified Security Assessor) who will visit and advise on best practice for data storage and the various other points that come into play. For this level of compliance you're looking at yearly audits (carried out by the QSA), and quarterly network scans. Take a look at the audit procedures to get a detailed look at what is involved. In particular take a look at section 3 and do not underestimate the difficulty of implementing proper key management.
In summary, full PCI compliance will be very costly. Even for a company which already has pretty strong security policies the cost of bringing in a QSA and running quarterly scans and yearly audits alone will likely cost $thousands.
This is very insecure and I think you're correct for opposing it. That said...
Some ideas:
Can the hotel give you a rate/group code that you can disseminate to your users directly? Perhaps you could even give them a link that goes right to the hotel's reservation page, with the code already filled in.
Don't even think about implementing this unless you can do it on an SSL-enabled site.
Don't save the CC number anywhere,
just generate the email and toss the
number out. This alleviates you from having to worry about a ton of very difficult application / server security issues.
Encrypt the email with GPG or
equivalent so that it's protected in
transit and can only be read by the intended recipient.
I suggest you follow the Card Industry PCI compliance closely at least. Here is a PDF document.
As someone who has worked on a system like this, it is 100% illegal to store any credit card information in plain text. You must encrypt all of the data and you are not allowed to know any piece of the keys. It is quite the catch 22, the only way to validate data is to guess as sad as that sounds. This is the exact reason why accidental charges occur.
As others have said here, it's a fact that storing credit card information requires you to be certified. You can ask for information to process the transaction but keeping it on storage of any kind is a big no-no.
Fortunately sites like authorize.net, braintree.com, paypal.com, etc will let you interact with their APIs in such a way that you get a "Customer Vault ID" for each entity you'd like to make transactions for.
These 3rd parties store all the sensitive information in a 100% legit way. And whenever you would like to make a transaction using their saved information, you interact with the service using their "Vault ID".
I've used authorize.net, BrainTree and PayPal. Most recently it was BrainTree and had some good success with them. I would not recommend PayPal unless you need the brand recognition or you just want to do a direct transfer whereby you bypass asking them for account information of any kind (because they already entered it in PayPal).
Make sure your server is as secure as possible and prove that it isn't already compromised. None of this will really work well if you have a compromised server.
Use SSL to protect this information during transit.
Encrypt these details immediately upon receipt. This will help protect it at rest. If possible, encrypt it with a public key for a key pair where the private key (used for decryption) is not on your server. This could easily be that you place this information into the body of the email that you're required to send, then encrypt the body with public-key encryption where your client has the private key. (You could use PGP here). In this way, the data is help on your server as briefly as possible, then once off your server, is accessible only by your client. If you use a symmetric encryption algorithm, then your key will necessarily also be on your server somewhere (on disk, in memory, etc.), which could be obtained and used by an attacker to regain access to the details.
This isn't an endorsement, per se, but I have used this before in similar situations with good results: http://www.pgp.com/products/commandline/
Remember that there are always security holes, but you'll be raising a large barrier against attacks with these steps. I might also add that you look into a system integrity solution like Trip Wire from the immediate build of your server. And of course, ensure that all of your passwords are strong.
If you send the file via email, be sure to use secured connexions (HTTPS / IMAP or POP3 over SSL, SMTP over SSL) on both sending and receiving computers and have the file encrypted prior sending. You can encrypt your mail and attachment via OpenPGP, too. Also, ensure the security between the two mail servers (sending and receiving), or simply use the same domain for sending and receiving email addresses. Do not use the password-feature of a ZIP file or related comrpessing container, since they are usually cryptographically weak.
If you send it on a filesystem (ie. USB pendrive), be sure to use a crypted one (ie. TrueCrypt).
Be sure to have a secured computer where the download and upload takes part (encrypted partition where the download/upload takes place, no spywares on the system, passworded system, firewalled).
For the sake of simplicity I want to use admin links like this for a site:
http://sitename.com/somegibberish.php?othergibberish=...
So the actual URL and the parameter would be some completely random string which only I would know.
I know security through obscurity is generally a bad idea, but is it a realistic threat someone can find out the URL? Don't take the employees of the hosting company and eavesdroppers on the line into account, because it is a toy site, not something important and the hosting company doesn't give me secure FTP anyway, so I'm only concerned about normal visitors.
Is there a way of someone finding this URL? It wouldn't be anywhere on the web, so Google won't now it about either. I hope, at least. :)
Any other hole in my scheme which I don't see?
Well, if you could guarantee only you would ever know it, it would work. Unfortunately, even ignoring malicious men in the middle, there are many ways it can leak out...
It will appear in the access logs of your provider, which might end up on Google (and are certainly read by the hosting admins)
It's in your browsing history. Plugins, extensions etc have access to this, and often use upload it elsewhere (i.e. StumbleUpon).
Any proxy servers along the line see it clearly
It could turn up as a Referer to another site
some completely random string
which only I would know.
Sounds like a password to me. :-)
If you're going to have to remember a secret string I would suggest doing usernames and passwords "properly" as HTTP servers will have been written to not leak password information; the same is not true of URLs.
This may only be a toy site but why not practice setting up security properly as it won't matter if you get it wrong. So hopefully, if you do have a site which you need to secure in future you'll have already made all your mistakes.
I know security through obscurity is
generally a very bad idea,
Fixed it for you.
The danger here is that you might get in the habit of "oh, it worked for Toy such-and-such site, so I won't bother implementing real security on this other site."
You would do a disservice to yourself (and any clients/users of your system) if you ignore Kerckhoff's Principle.
That being said, rolling your own security system is a bad idea. Smarter people have already created security libraries in the other major languages, and even smarter people have reviewed and tweaked those libraries. Use them.
It could appear on the web via a "Referer leak". Say your page links to my page at http://entrian.com/, and I publish my web server referer logs on the web. There'll be an entry saying that http://entrian.com/ was accessed from http://sitename.com/somegibberish.php?othergibberish=...
As long as the "login-URL" never posted anywhere, there shouldn't be any way for search engines to find it. And if it's just a small, personal toy-site with no personal or really important content, I see this as a fast and decent-working solution regarding security compared to implementing some form of proper login/authorization system.
If the site is getting a big number of users and lots of content, or simply becomes more than a "toy site", I'd advice you to do it the proper way
I don't know what your toy admin page would display, but keep in mind that when loading external images or linking to somewhere else, your referrer is going to publicize your URL.
If you change http into https, then at least the url will not be visible to anyone sniffing on the network.
(the caveat here is that you also need to consider that very obscure login system can leave interesting traces to be found in the network traces (MITM), somewhere on the site/target for enabling priv.elevation, or on the system you use to log in if that one is no longer secure and some prefer admin login looking no different from a standard user login to avoid that)
You could require that some action be taken # of times and with some number of seconds of delays between the times. After this action,delay,action,delay,action pattern was noticed, the admin interface would become available for login. And the urls used in the interface could be randomized each time with a single use url generated after that pattern. Further, you could only expose this interface through some tunnel and only for a minute on a port encoded by the delays.
If you could do all that in a manner that didn't stand out in the logs, that'd be "clever" but you could also open up new holes by writing all that code and it goes against "keep it simple stupid".
I'm thinking of using Google Docs as a content management system, and to integrate it with my java/j2ee web application.
I only need to upload, view, search meta-data, and organize docs.
Would anybody have a reason to believe I should not try this?
One good reason not to do that is that then you have no control over your system's uptime. Google does occasionally have outages, which would take your system down as well.
In addition, by storing them on Google's servers, you are giving up any control over privacy. There is nothing you can do to ensure Google's security of both their live systems and their backup systems will never be broken, and if they get broken in to, your documents' privacy is lost. In addition, you'll need to keep an eye on Google's terms of use. They may very well update it to read "We reserve the right to sell your documents to whomever we please." which may include your competitors.
That being said, if downtime won't break you, and privacy isn't a huge concern, it doesn't sound like a bad idea. Just make sure they're not the ONLY place you're storing your documents.