Ebay Hacked!
Friday, September 28th, 2007If you’re an Ebay user, you may want to call your bank. On September 25th the popular online auction site was hacked. The hacker, posting as “Vlad” was brazen enough to reveal himself by posting the usernames, contact info, and credit card/banking info of over 1,000 users on one of Ebay’s Community message boards for several hours before it was shut down by Ebay. The remaining message boards were buzzing with worried users, many who became frustrated with Ebay’s lack of public response to the breach. What is particularly troubling about this event is Ebay’s lack of response. 
They have not, to anyone’s knowledge, contacted any of the members who’s personal info was compromised and in fact are remaining pretty tight lipped about the situation, saying only that the person responsible is a “malicious fraudster”. They also claim the credit card info displayed by the hacker was invalid, but several user reports dispute them. ComputerWorld.com posted an article yesterday calling for Ebay to come clean and explain to its members exactly what happened and what is being done to prevent it from happening again. We can only hope that they do the right thing and stop what appears to be a large scale cover-up.
If you had credit card or bank account info on file with Ebay, don’t take any chances. Call your CC provider and/or bank and tell them your info has been compromised. It may also be worthwhile to contact the major credit bureaus and have a fraud alert placed on your reports. Protect yourself!
2GB Flash Memory(no hard drive)
Aside from hogging bandwith and the general annoyance factor, spam also spreads spyware and malware such as trojan horses-and that’s not all. These days spammers have gone beyond out inboxes to the web itself, putting up thousands of websites, some nothing more than what are called “link farms”, (a page of nothing but links) splogs(fake blogs who’s sole purpose is to exploit Google’s Adsense program)or plastered with banner ads. Other spammers are more sinister and put up pages that look innocent and legit but have embedded codes that can do everything from plaster your desktop with ads and icons to stealing your passwords and credit card info. These types of pages are frequently used in what is called “phishing”. The scammer puts together a page that looks like it is from a legit source such as eBay, Paypal, or your bank and emals it to you. It usually contains a dire warning that your account has been compromised and you need to verify your info or risk suspension. These fake sites look very very convincing, but there are three easy ways to figure out if they are real or not. The first one is quite basic. Most companies will never ask you to provide personal info via email. Second, any email you get from a company you have an account with will almost always be address to you by name. Third, simply put your mouse pointer over the link and look at the bar at the bottom. It will display the real address and 99 times out of 100 it will be a scam site, not the legit one. 
junkware, and retailers such as Best Buy actually profit by offering to remove it for a fee. You may find some of the trial applets useful, but if you choose to remove them all, you’ll see a substantial improvement in speed and performance. 
