Vladuz Unleashed: eBay Seems to Be Losing The Hacking Dog Fight

For the second time in as many days, Vladuz has breached eBay Inc. security measures and took over employee accounts. After taking control of eBay employee account kelbel@ebay.comdiscussion boards. This time, however, the stolen pinkliner status posting did not result in the usual pink bar that normally accompanies employee posts - leaving many to speculate that eBay possibly eliminated the ability for posts from IP addresses outside of the eBay system to appear as pinkliners. Whatever the reason for the lack of the pinkline, there still was an eBay logo placed on the main page of the forum next to the discussion thread (denoting that an eBay employee had indeed posted there). he made a post to the eBay Germany community

Vladuz's first (documented, God only knows what all he did) order of business once taking control of the eBay employee account was to change the user ID from kelbel@eBay.com to vladuz-unleashed.

The username brought the Jet Li movie, Unleashed, to my mind. In the movie Li's character is chained and caged like a dog. Once Li's collar is removed he becomes a virtual killing machine, destroying anything in his path. But as the movie progresses, you find that Li's character has a heart under the violent exterior. Not sure if that was the type of symbolism that Vladuz was going for or not. However, there has been some recent symbolism provided by numerous members of the eBay community that equates Vladuz to Robin Hood. Discussion have taken place on both the US and German sites about this topic as well as other
eBay-related forums.

Vladuz responded today to posts that were discussing the similarities and differences between Vladuz and Robin Hood on the German discussion boards. An eBay member said that Vladuz is not a modern Robin Hood, to which Vladuz responded, "Robin Hood? Hooray." Immediately Vladuz was greeted and welcomed to the conversations and posters started asking questions concerning his recent activities and his hint that he may be appearing on CNN on March 15th. Vladuz this time did not answer any questions. Screenshot of vladuz-unleashed's post below:

eBay finally got around to addressing today's hacking by changing the password and username of the compromised account. Several hours later the user ID of the eBay employee could be found when doing a search for member "vladuz-unleashed" in Advanced Search (in fact, as I write this, it still is showing when I search for Vladuz's ID-du-jour.

Whatever his intent, Vladuz is developing a following. Good or bad, it's happening little by little. And likewise, eBay is looking more and more like "bumbling idiots" according to more and more users and onlookers, including the folks at eBaymotorssucks. eBay has yet to issue their usual round of denials following this most recent hacking.....stay tuned, I'm sure it is coming.