If you’ve changed your eBay password in the last few weeks, great, if not please read on, because your account and details may have been compromised

Apologies if you’ve already seen this and taken action. I know that sometimes even official emails from eBay can look like ‘spam’, so I wanted to make absolutely sure you knew about this.

Between February and March one of eBay’s contact databases was breached by hackers.

This database contained more than 145 million personal contact records – our emails, addresses and birth dates. eBay should be feeling pretty shame faced right now because they haven’t handled this at all well…

It took more than 2 months to detect the breach (apparently that’s normal) and then when they did, really bungled letting us know about it. First they were delayed in getting the news out, then they were lazy about helping us fix it. Notices on the website were not clear and the email notification from eBay was distinctly un-apologetic. This is a major security breach, no matter how much they try to play it down and a huge corporation like eBay should really have got their act together on this.

Anyway, rant over.

If you have an eBay account, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to eBay.co.uk (or eBay.com) and click on the orange button at the top of the page:

2. Click on the ‘Reset Your Password’ link at the top:

3. Enter your email, click continue and follow the instructions

VERY IMPORTANT:

If you use the same email and password on any other websites, then please change your password on these websites as well.

The ne’er-do-wells who’ve swiped this data will be trying to use this information to log into other websites you might have access to.