As everyone knows by now, eBay was hacked — the official line is that the event was “a cyberattack that compromised a database containing encrypted passwords and other non-financial data”. After staying quiet on the topic for too long, eBay is sending all its users an email advising that they — yes, that’s you — change passwords immediately.
If you have ever created an account with eBay, even if you haven’t bid on or bought anything, you’ll be getting an email from eBay soon enough. However, the company’s representatives say, sending the email out to everyone will take quite some time — with 145 million users, that’s not surprising — so they’re sharing it any way they can.
Here it is:
Important: eBay Password Reset Required
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. 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
President, eBay Marketplaces
[eBay]