WORLD
Uber paid hackers to cover up massive data breach
Baku, November 22, AZERTAC
Uber Technologies Inc paid hackers $100,000 to keep secret a massive breach last year that exposed the personal information of about 57 million accounts of the ride-service provider, the company said on Tuesday.
Discovery of the U.S. company`s cover-up of the incident resulted in the firing of two employees responsible for its response to the hack, said Dara Khosrowshahi, who replaced co-founder Travis Kalanick as CEO in August.
The breach occurred in October 2016 but Khosrowshahi said he had only recently learned of it.
The stolen information included names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers of Uber users around the world, and the names and license numbers of 600,000 U.S. drivers, Khosrowshahi said.
Uber passengers need not worry as there was no evidence of fraud, while drivers whose license numbers had been stolen would be offered free identity theft protection and credit monitoring, Uber said. Two hackers gained access to proprietary information stored on GitHub, a service that allows engineers to collaborate on software code. There, the two people stole Uber`s credentials for a separate cloud-services provider where they were able to download driver and rider data, the company said.
A GitHub spokeswoman said the hack was not the result of a failure of GitHub`s security.