Comments on: My eBay Account Was Hacked!

By: firefly

firefly — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:11:05 +0000

The same happened to me today. I religiously use AVG, Search & Destroy on my PC’s as well as scan daily with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. The funny thing is I haven’t logged into my ebay account for a looooong time so I suspect that this hack was not in any way due to my negligence. Makes me wonder…

By: Bags

Bags — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 03:06:57 +0000

I received the same email about a year ago. The most frustrating thing is that eBay won’t tell you how they know your account was hacked because they don’t want hackers finding out how to get around their tactics. The problem is that you as the end user can’t figure out how to better prevent the problem it in the future other than guessing.

By: Valerie

Valerie — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:19:04 +0000

Take a look at Roboform.com. This password protection program is superb! It encrypts your passwords and enters them automatically. It also will create random passwords for you. You can lock it completely by password to the program itself. It eliminates all possibility of a keyboard spy program. It comes in two versions…one for a desktop, one you can run on your flashdisk and carry with you…use it on ANY computer, and it doesn’t leave any data on the computer on which you use it.

By: dong

dong — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:11:15 +0000

I always quickly check most emails even if I think it might be phishy just in case. Stuff like this makes me want to have secureid for everything.

By: dimes

dimes — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 01:44:40 +0000

No fun. I forgot I even have an ebay account until they sent me a message reminding me.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:59:11 +0000

How do you think they got it, by hacking ebay, from a phisher email, or by just guessing your password with some hacking software?

There’s a neat little tool from Microsoft.com that I always use when creating passwords, a “Password Checker”, here’s a link! https://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx

By: Lazy Man and Money

Lazy Man and Money — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:29:21 +0000

Yes, this is indeed quite scary. I wouldn’t have caught on for another 2 months when I next decided log into Ebay and found a problem.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:50:30 +0000

You should purchase the One Time Password utility that PayPal sells for $5 for more security. I think business accounts get it for free.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:37:27 +0000

Another trick you should look out for with stuff like this is phishers will email you with something like this, and, courteous people that they are, will provide a link that appears to go directly to the login page of your ebay account so you can quickly change your password. But instead, the link goes to their site, so when you login to change your password they’ve got your username and password.

By: tinyhands

tinyhands — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:27:11 +0000

If you wanted to know if the eBay email was authentic, you can read the complete headers to see if it was really sent by them or spoofed.

By: Nathan Whitehead

Nathan Whitehead — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:42:12 +0000

I recommend closing your Ebay and PayPal accounts (I did recently). Ebay has tremendous security problems, I wouldn’t (and don’t) trust them with my money anymore. My account was hacked in a similar way to yours. And then the winning bidder in my auction was a Nigerian scam. I have a recent entry in my blog with more details. Ebay is not worth the hassle and security risk.

I now use craigslist for buying and selling junk (cash in person). All the small online merchants take credit cards nowadays, you don’t really need a PayPal account except for Ebay.

By: sam

sam — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:18:48 +0000

Sounds like you do have a keylogger or tracker on your computer the avg program you have wont catch this type of thing go to avg homepage and get their trial of the new avg anti malware i had the normal avg and i had so many viruses on my computer i didn’t know what to do and i contacted avg and they said for me to visit their home page and download their trials and see which one helped and the malware was able to rid my computer of everything that the normal avg didn’t detected i hope this helps you out :)

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:52:58 +0000

I don’t think I would have ever caught that since I usually automatically just delete any Ebay email as phishing. Probably would have gone unnoticed until I tried to login.

You may want to try pairing up AVG with some anti-spyware tools like Search & Destroy, SpySweeper, and AdAware just to be sure.