EBay Users Urged to Change Passwords After Data Breach

Online marketplace eBay is the latest victim of a cyberattack. The company is now urging its customers – all 145 million of them – to change their passwords to protect their accounts.

According to USA Today, hackers accessed an eBay database that includes customers’ names, encrypted passwords, emails and physical addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. It’s not known how many accounts were hacked. The data breach occurred in late February or early March.

EBay said customers’ financial data has not been compromised.

It seems like security breaches like this one are becoming the norm. Avivah Litan, a security analyst with Gartner, a Connecticut-based technology research company, told USA Today.

“It’s part of a trend where criminals are going after credentials,” she said. “We’ve seen a big rise in the use of stolen passwords at banks. The criminals are cycling through all these passwords they’ve stolen, trying to use them,” she said.

At some point, “it could become pretty ominous. All this data’s getting stolen — we have to assume it’s eventually going to be used,” said Litan. “The criminals are building big data stores with as much financial information as they can get. Who knows what they’re doing with all of it?

So far, eBay said in a press release, it hasn’t seen any indication of an increase in fraudulent activity on its site. “The company also said it has no evidence of unauthorized access or compromises to personal or financial information for PayPal users,” according to the press release. PayPal data is stored separately from eBay on a secure network with encrypted information.

In addition to changing your eBay password, it’s recommended that you change it for any other accounts that share the same password, as a precautionary measure. You should never use the same password for multiple accounts.

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