14 DAY TRIAL // Some things you just can't prevent. eBay is striving as hard as they can to make it safe for their customers, as they offer a lot of protection methods and they increase security on their site, but it seems that no matter what they do, from time to time we still get eBay related crime news. eBay users' sensitive information spilled out on a forum dedicated to fighting fraud, all due to the hackers' work. About 1.200 users have been affected by it.
As seen on The Register, the miscreants created a sort of script that caused each user to log in and post information associated with the person who owned the account. They're also informing that the script spit out 15 posts per minute, which is an average of one post every 4 seconds!
The info that popped up on the forum, for everyone to see, was that standard data phishers and spammers are interested in user names, e-mail addresses and possibly credit card numbers.
It cannot be told for sure how things worked for the hackers, but an eBay representative stated that the posts were most probably the outcome of account takeovers than of a security breach on eBay. In any case, the affected users have been notified about what has happened.
The Web is not exactly what I would call the best place to do business, but it sure is an efficient one. People that conduct transactions over the Net should be aware of the risks they expose themselves to. The Internet still has a long hard road to walk before it can be called secure! There is not much that any of those eBay users could have done to prevent this, but for the rest of you - here's a piece of advice: Stop posting your data out in the open for everyone to see! This can lead to ID theft, spam and who knows what else. Posting an e-mail address on a site will get you spam, since bots crawl pages in search of targets.