It appears that eBay wasn't fully aware of what happened when some 145 million users saw their customer data breached by hackers in recent months. The breach was discovered earlier this month and while efforts have been put in place to restore confidence in the online selling website, its global marketplace chief said the company thought everything was okay and data was not stolen.
The statements from Devin Wenig come after the company is to face investigations in at least three states over its failure to respond to the data breach in proper fashion. State governments are looking closely at the company and its online security apparatus and efforts to ensure customer personal information and data is not being taken by third parties.
Although most reports suggest eBay uncovered the breach in early May, Wenig would not comment on specifics as to when the company officially knew of what had happened.
Among the data breach were encrypted passwords and other personal data. According to eBay and reports on the matter, there are currently no issues pertaining to passwords being compromised or any bank details.
"For a very long period of time we did not believe that there was any eBay customer data compromised," says Wenig.
"When we found out that there was, we moved swiftly to disclose," he added.
The company has since the breach, hired a number of security firms to deal with the website's security and financial streams, where users buy and sell products using the popular online banking system, PayPal. It is unclear what those companies are doing specifically or how many resources eBay is putting towards the issue of security.
The website has urged users to change their passwords in order to ensure no further action against their accounts takes place with the stolen data.
Wenig said that the company is taking all efforts necessary to inform its users of the breach and what that entails for their future, but to do so takes time.
"You would imagine that anyone who has ever touched eBay is a large number," he said. "So we're going to send all of them an email, but sending that number all at once is not operationally possible, so we're rolling through it."
