The recently leaked eBay customer information is actually fake

eBay on Thursday acknowledged that some of its customers’ personal information may have been compromised following a breach, advising users to immediately change their passwords. The announcement has apparently been enough for some creative individuals with malicious intentions to advertise online “full eBay database dumps,” masquerading as the hackers that conducted the cyberattack. However, TechCrunch reports that eBay says those databases are fake, and the for sale lists do not contain “authentic eBay accounts,” which is very good news for eBay consumers whose personal data may have been exposed.

Following yesterday’s announcement of a cyberattack which compromised a “large number” of eBay users’ personal information, several lists purporting to contain that illegally acquired information have now shown up online. On anonymous data-sharing site Pastebin, for example, there are at least a couple of offers to provide “full eBay database dumps,” which you can pay for via bitcoin. However, eBay tells us that, at least so far, none of these published lists contain “authentic eBay accounts.” As one commenter on Hacker News theorized this morning, these lists were probably targeted at “people gullible enough to send $1000 speculatively to a random person on the internet.” It seems they were right. These are not legit data dumps, eBay says. Fortunately, too, it seems no one has taken the bait, either – in both cases, the associated bitcoin address shows no transactions as of the time of publication.