The recently leaked eBay customer information is actually fake

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.