Uber paid hackers $100,000 to cover up security breach affecting 57 million accounts

The globally renowned ride-hailing giant, Uber has been exposed on concealing a big security breach that affected 57 million users’ accounts. Uber paid $100,000 to hackers in exchange for their silence back in 2016, as reported by Bloomberg.

Two Uber’s executives were also fired from the company for their response to the hack. The bold steps have been taken by Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi who became CEO of the company replacing former chief Travis Kalanick, back in August.

The data accessed by hackers during security breach includes 600,000 drivers of the United States, whose names and license number were also in the downloaded information. However, some personal information of 57 million Uber users around the world was also downloaded during the breach. This information included names, email addresses, and mobile phone numbers.

Khosrowshahi said in a blog post, “None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it.”

However, forensic experts claimed that trip location history, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and such other personal information were secured and not included in the breached information.

The security breach is one of the big controversies that Uber has faced earlier, on the top of them comes sexual harassment allegations and lawsuits claiming trade secrets theft.

Joe Sullivan, Uber’s chief security officer, and a lawyer Craig Clark have been laid off by the company because of covering up the incident and concealing the security breach.

Uber’s CEO seems willing to eradicate past mistakes and aims to work with whole new motivation level, as he says,

“While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.”

Bloomberg report also mentioned that two hackers gained access to information stored on GitHub, a service that allows engineers to work on software code. Thus, they were able to steal Uber’s credentials for a separate cloud-services provider and downloaded driver and rider data.

Uber has also suggested riders to keep calm and no need to take any action, as they are already monitoring the accounts who got affected by the fraudulent activity. As for drivers, Uber is providing them free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.