EBay initially thought that user data was safe following the security breach it fell victim to recently. As it turns out, that wasn’t the case at all; as Reuters noted in a recent report, eBay has now confirmed that personal data belonging to all 145 million of its users was accessed and compromised in the attack, making it one of the biggest breaches of all time.
In other words, change your eBay password immediately if you haven’t already.
Reuters says that eBay initially thought all user data was safe from attackers in the breach, but an eBay executive confirmed that wasn’t the case while speaking with Reuters in what were the company’s first public comments from a top exec since the breach.
“For a very long period of time we did not believe that there was any eBay customer data compromised,” eBay global marketplaces chief Devin Wenig told the news organization. Once the company learned that data was compromised, the executive says eBay moved quickly to disclose the breach.
According to Wenig, email addresses and encrypted passwords for all 145 million eBay users were compromised. It is unclear if or when hackers will be able to break the encryption protecting the passwords, but users should obviously change their passwords anyway as a precaution.
Wenig said “millions” of eBay users have already changed their passwords, though he failed to elaborate. The executive also said that eBay is taking measures to protect its network in order to ensure that a similar breach does not happen again in the future.
