The actual extent of the eBay hack remains unknown at this stage but eBay is in the process of sending out notification emails to all its members advising them to change their passwords. eBay currently has 145 million or so registered users worldwide so this process is bound to take some time, and it also presents a perfect opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit the situation.
Should you receive an email purportedly emanating from eBay, DO NOT, any under circumstances, click on any links or provide any information. To change your password, if you haven’t done so already; go directly to the eBay site, login to your account, go to My eBay > My eBay Summary > Account > Personal Information, and change your password there:
UPDATE – 27th May
I received my official eBay notification email today. It is not addressed to me personally but, as I suspected, it does not contain any links or requests for information:
IMPORTANT: PASSWORD UPDATE
Dear eBay Member,
To help ensure customers’ trust and security on eBay, I am asking all eBay users to change their passwords.
Here’s why: Recently, our company discovered a cyberattack on our corporate information network. This attack compromised a database containing eBay user passwords.
What’s important for you to know: We have no evidence that your financial information was accessed or compromised. And your password was encrypted.
What I ask of you:
Go to eBay and change your password. If you changed your password on May 21 or later, we do not need you to take any additional action at this time.Changing your password may be inconvenient. I realize that. We are doing everything we can to protect your data and changing your password is an extra precautionary step, in addition to the other security measures we have in place.
If you have only visited eBay as a guest user, we do not have a password on file.
If you used the same eBay password on any other site, I encourage you to change your password on those sites too. And if you are a PayPal user, we have no evidence that this attack affected your PayPal account or any PayPal financial information, which is encrypted and stored on a separate secure network.
Here are other steps we are taking:
As always, we have strong protections in place for both buyers and sellers in the event of any unauthorized activity on your account.
We are applying additional security to protect our customers.
We are working with law enforcement and leading security experts to aggressively investigate the matter.Here’s what we know: This attack occurred between late February and early March and resulted in unauthorized access to a database of eBay users that includes customers’ name, encrypted password, email address, physical address, phone number and date of birth.
However, the file did not contain financial information. And, after conducting extensive testing and analysis of our systems, we have no evidence that any customer financial or credit card information was involved. We also have no indication of a significant spike in fraudulent activity on our site.
We apologize for any inconvenience or concern that this situation may cause you. As a global marketplace, nothing is more important to eBay than the security and trust of our customers. We know our customers have high expectations of us, and we are committed to ensuring a safe and secure online experience for you on any connected device.
Devin Wenig Signature
Devin Wenig
President, eBay Marketplaces
