E-commerce site EBay is asking users to change their passwords after a cyberattack compromised a company database containing customers’ names, encrypted passwords, e-mail addresses, physical addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth.
The company said on Wednesday that there is no evidence that any financial or credit card information was stolen and no sign that the breach has resulted in unauthorized activity for its 145 million active users.
EBay says its investigation is active and it cannot comment on the specific number of accounts affected, but says the number could be large.
The company said that cyberattackers stole a small number of employee login credentials that gave access to EBay’s corporate network. The San Jose, California-based company is working with law enforcement to investigate the attack, it added.
The database was allegedly hacked sometime between late February and early March, it said, but the compromised employee log-in credentials were first detected just two weeks ago.
EBay owns electronic payment service PayPal, but says there is no evidence that PayPal information was hacked, since that data is stored separately.
The attack follows several other high-profile data security incidents, including a breach at Target and the recent discovery of the “Heartbleed” computer security flaw.
Heartbleed is a point of weakness in a key piece of security technology used by more than 500,000 Web sites that had been exposing online passwords and other sensitive data to potential theft for more than two years.
During Target’s data breach last year, hackers allegedly stole about 40 million debit and credit card numbers and the personal information of 70 million people.
EBay Inc shares fell US$0.08 to US$51.88 in New York trading on Wednesday.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the