ebay woes for the Editor

Reading my daily newspaper on 21st May, I discovered there’d been a ebay security breach.

The article said that hackers had secured details of all UK ebay account holders – including names, passwords, security questions, email addresses, etc etc.

I immediately logged into my account and discovered that it had been compromised – four items with a gross value of around $2,500 had been credited to my account as ‘purchases.’

During some further checking, I realised that I’d had no email on one of my email accounts for some time – that could have been hacked as well.

I remembered, with horror, that I’d made a fundamental computing error – using the same password for ebay and one of my personal email accounts.

Fortunately I had a different password for my PayPal account – or the situation could have been really bad.

I spent the longest hour of my life ‘waiting in line’ to speak to an ebay security technician – I’m still hopeful that the 0800 number was indeed a freephone number.

As I was no longer able to access or send mail from my ebay registered email account, the technician was unable to resolve my problem and, as it was ‘after hours’ I couldn’t get hold of BT to sort out my email.

The following morning I finally got to speak to BT, who confirmed that my email had also been compromised – on the same date 21 May 2014.

Owing to time differences (8 hours) it was further 12 hours before I was able to speak to the ebay technician – who very kindly had phoned me back – and he sorted my problem.

On the same day (22nd May) I read a second article in the press, which stated that ebay had known about the problem for several weeks. The article also stated that ebay account holders had been notified – I hadn’t.

It was only on 23rd May, after all my issues had been resolved, that I received an email from ebay – telling me about the problem – and advising me to change my password!!!

We all recognise that ebay’s appalling response to their security breach has bordered on the criminal – and whoever took the decision to withhold the information should resign or be fired – but the salutary lesson I’ve learned is NEVER, EVER use the same passwords.

Granville Sellars