Information has recently leaked to the worlds press stating that eBay was recently the centre of one of the worlds largest ever security breaches, Between late February and early March hackers managed to break into systems using a small collection of employee’s usernames and passwords. Once unlawful entry onto the corporate network had been established the hackers made off with a massive haul of what is though to be 233 million peoples names, phone numbers, email and postal addresses, dates of birth and salted and hashed passwords. More than 15 million of those users affected are believed to reside in the UK.
Although all user passwords are kept in an encrypted form, eBay are still prompting people to change their passwords as soon as is possible.
eBay have confirmed they have since shut down the unauthorised access, and have already started to put measures in place to prevent future data breaches. They have also confirmed that the database ‘lost’ in the hack attack did not contain any financial information, nor was there any evidence of a compromise of Paypal data or systems.
This data loss beats the previous record of 160 million credit card numbers stolen by 5 Russian hackers from a collection US companies from 2008 to 2013.
To date, no one has been found guilty of the eBay hack, eBay have confirmed they have been working with the FBI to track down the perpetrators.