Online payments system PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.
“On December 20, 2022, we confirmed that unauthorized parties were able to access your PayPal customer account using your login credentials,” the company said in the notification letter sent to the impacted individuals.
According to PayPal, between December 6 and 8, 2022, a third party accessed user accounts using login credentials obtained elsewhere. The unauthorized access was eliminated on December 8.
The company says the attackers likely obtained the login credentials via phishing or related nefarious activity, as it found no evidence that the company’s systems were breached.
The attackers, the company says, were able to access and potentially steal personal information from the victim accounts, including names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, individual tax identification numbers, and Social Security numbers.
“As of the time of writing, we have no information suggesting that any personal information was misused as a result of this incident, nor have there been unauthorized transactions on the affected accounts,” PayPal told the Maine Attorney General’s Office.
The online payments platform says it reset the passwords for the impacted user accounts and implemented “enhanced security controls to prevent any further unauthorized access”.
“We have not informed law enforcement of this incident, and this notification was not delayed as a result of a law enforcement investigation,” PayPal said.
The company told the Maine Attorney General that a total of 34,942 individuals were impacted in the incident.
In credential stuffing attacks, threat actors use leaked credentials obtained from a third-party source (often purchased on hacker forums) to access user accounts on different services. Such attacks are possible due to the reuse of credentials across multiple services.
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