Lifelock And EBay Are Latest Targets of Hackers

It’s been another busy day in the world of data breaches.

Hackers target eBay

eBay has been hacked. The hack apparently occurred months ago and they just figured it out now.

A Reuters report said eBay put up a warning at 1:30 ET asking people to change their info on PayPal. Then they pulled the warning down without explanation. Later, eBay came out publicly with the info that they were compromised, not PayPal, in what’s being called a cyber-attack.

So you must change your password on eBay stat. If you use same password on eBay as on other sites, you need to immediately change it on the other sites as well.

Of course, using the same password on multiple sites is very, very dangerous.

What you need is a password that’s both easy to remember and highly customizable for every different website you visit. Here’s one possibility, suggested to me by one of our web people on clark.com.

When you go to a website, you use the password you normally use, but have some system in place like appending the first two letters of the site’s name to your password. So if your password is ‘bluesky,’ you would use ‘blueskyza’ at Zappos or ‘blueskyam’ at Amazon.

Obviously, if everybody does this exact method, it will be easy for criminals to breach. But what I’m saying is come up with something easy that allows you to do something different that you can remember. Because that’s the problem with crazy alphanumeric passwords; nobody can remember them!