{"id":14953,"date":"2014-05-22T16:23:21","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T16:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kasperskydaily.com\/b2b\/?p=1876"},"modified":"2019-11-15T23:13:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T12:13:57","slug":"a-confirmed-ebay-leak-another-password-alert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/a-confirmed-ebay-leak-another-password-alert\/14953\/","title":{"rendered":"A confirmed eBay leak: another password alert"},"content":{"rendered":"

The season seems to be open: The dust hasn\u2019t yet settled after the Heartbleed semi-apocalyptic revelation, and now eBay has confirmed<\/a> that its security had been badly breached, with service clients\u2019 personal data leaked. The leak appears to be massive, since the perpetrators managed to steal credentials of the company\u2019s workers and infiltrated eBay\u2019s internal network. The company didn\u2019t disclose how it happened, so there\u2019s room for speculation. But they aren\u2019t exactly relevant now.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>

Apparently the breach occurred some time ago, which is a bad news on its own. According to an eBay Inc. announcement, the incident took place \u201cbetween late February and early March\u201d, but had only been discovered last week; forensic experts had been called, and after the worst suspicions had been confirmed, the company made an announcement.<\/p>\n

This means perpetrators had at least two and a half months to put their loot to use. The loot in question included \u201ceBay customers\u2019 name, encrypted password, email address, physical address, phone number, and date of birth.\u201d Then comes the good news: The database did not contain any financial information or other confidential personal information. Even better: Passwords had been stored encrypted.<\/p>\n

Still it doesn\u2019t make them absolutely non-susceptible for the hackers. As Forbes\u2019 James Lyne puts it<\/a>,\u00a0 \u201c\u2026imagine what the cyber criminals can achieve with their substantial botnets (large networks of computers running remote control code that can be tasked with anything the cyber criminal wants) and the benefit of time on their side\u201d.<\/i> Definitely they have some time already.<\/p>\n

Besides, as it\u2019s been said before, attackers have compromised \u201ca small number of employees\u2019 log-in credentials,\u201d which allowed them unauthorized access to eBay\u2019s corporate network. It\u2019s possible hackers could also have helped themselves with encryption keys. That would expose client passwords without much effort. This, however, is unconfirmed by eBay so far and hopefully will stay that way.<\/p>\n

eBay recommends its users to change their passwords ASAP and never recycle them.<\/p>Tweet<\/a><\/blockquote>\n

More good news: Cyberattackers failed to get their hands on credit card data since it is stored separately (Well done, eBay). Also PayPal hasn\u2019t been compromised either, or at least there is no evidence of that. \u201cPayPal data is stored separately on a secure network, and all PayPal financial information is encrypted,\u201d company said in a statement. It also has no evidence that the stolen personal data had been abused. At least for now.<\/p>\n

Still, it is strongly recommended to check and change all passwords ASAP, at least to eBay itself. Even if PayPal\u2019s safe (unless you used the same password for both PayPal and eBay) one may feel \u2018healthily paranoid\u2019, and it definitely won\u2019t cause any harm to change password there either.<\/p>\n

Deploy all of your antiphishing tools (which you hopefully use already) and stay on alert. It\u2019s clear that phishers are going to take their chances, and the avalanche of malicious e-mails exploiting the topic is coming very soon. Most likely they will be well-crafted, so extra security is paramount here.<\/p>\n

If you are a business owner, your workers may need to hear (yet another?) lecture on safe browsing and working with e-mails, so that they don\u2019t fall victim to something similar to what preceded the latest eBay breach.<\/p>\n

eBay plans to send out notifications for their users \u2013 via email, site communications and other marketing channels \u2013 asking users to change their password. The company\u2019s announcement ends with the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn addition to asking users to change their eBay password, the company said it also is encouraging any eBay user who utilized the same password on other sites to change those passwords, too. The same password should never be used across multiple sites or accounts\u201d.<\/i><\/p>\n

A good point. Actually not recycling passwords (especially when it comes to money, etc) is an ABC of web security, something so essential that it\u2019s often overlooked. Practice shows that extra reminders are always a good thing. And just like Heartbleed has brought society\u2019s attention to problems of passwords, so does this eBay breach now.<\/p>\n

Which is possibly the only positive outcome of this situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The season seems to be open: The dust hasn\u2019t yet settled after the Heartbleed semi-apocalyptic revelation, and now eBay has confirmed that its security had been badly breached, with service<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":16151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1999,2994],"tags":[652,270,97],"class_list":{"0":"post-14953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"category-smb","9":"tag-ebay","10":"tag-password-security","11":"tag-security-2"},"hreflang":[{"hreflang":"en-au","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/a-confirmed-ebay-leak-another-password-alert\/14953\/"},{"hreflang":"x-default","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/a-confirmed-ebay-leak-another-password-alert\/14953\/"},{"hreflang":"en-za","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/a-confirmed-ebay-leak-another-password-alert\/14953\/"}],"acf":[],"banners":"","maintag":{"url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/tag\/ebay\/","name":"eBay"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25195,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14953\/revisions\/25195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}