eBay

Users have taken to social media to report an outage of auction website eBay, but as yet the company has not responded.

The outage began shortly after 10pm CDT, or around 4am UK time, persisting for several hours.

Symptoms varied from problems with storefronts to complete website outage. All were intermittent and seemed to vary between time zones. Some users of the eBay message boards commented that the problem was isolated to certain parts of the website such as eBay Motors, while others found that they could access the website, but could not sign in.

eBay is asking all users to change their passwords because of a cyberattack.

It says that the attack compromised passwords and other nonfinancial data. Cyberattackers reportedly used employee credentials to gain unauthorized access to eBay's corporate network and a database that contained customers' names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn is stirring up another shitstorm. This time, he’s going after eBay, accusing the web giant of harboring competitors on its board of directors. Ultimately, the billionaire investor is throwing his weight around in order to make himself some extra cash, but he has stumbled onto a phenomenon that will only become more common at the highest levels of the tech world. As the giants of tech keep expanding — entering each others’ markets, looking more like one another — apparent conflicts of internet are only going to pop up in the board room more often.

There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.

The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.

The online auction house eBay has fixed two vulnerabilities in its US web site. One of the vulnerabilities was a critical SQL injection hole in the site's selling area that gave potential attackers unauthorised read and write access to one of the company's databases. SQL injection holes allow attackers to inject database commands by exploiting inadequately filtered HTTP parameters.

Vladuz, the Romanian hacker who repeatedly accessed off-limits parts of eBay's website and then publicly taunted company officials over the security lapses, has been handed a suspended three-year sentence, according to news reports.

The Bucharest appeal court issued the sentence on Wednesday to 23-year-old Vlad Duiculescu, AFP reported. He was arrested in Romania in 2008, with help from US Secret Service agents, after eBay said his exploits caused at least $1 million in damage. He was imprisoned for almost two years before being released last year.