EBay Inc. Hacked and Their Customers Password and Personal Information Stolen

EBay Inc. is an American multinational Internet consumer-to-consumer corporation, headquartered in San Jose, California.

Hackers were able to gain access to a database containing the stolen information, using a few compromised EBay employees’ login credentials. The database contains encrypted password, email address, physical address, phone number and date of birth.

A few months ago, Target, an American retailing company, suffered a massive data breach (unauthorized access) that may have affected approximately 40 million of their customers' credit and debit card information. The breach happened between November 27, 2013 and December 15, 2013, which spans Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the busiest shopping time of the year.

Ebay Inc. said it has not seen any indication of increased fraudulent account activity, and is asking all customers to change their EBay passwords, and passwords for their other online accounts, if they are the same as their EBay’s password.

Updated May 24, 2014: Ebay sent the following notification to their customers:

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

For more information about the Ebay hack, please click here.

This article is related to the following:

• Millions of Target Customers Credit - Debit Card Information Stolen

Check the comment section for additional information, or share what you know or ask a question about this article, by clicking the 'View or Write Comment' button below.

Note: Some of the information in samples on this website may have been impersonated or spoofed.