In 2016, hackers stole information from 57 million driver and rider accounts and then approached Uber and demanded $100,000 to delete their copy of the data. Uber arranged the payment but kept the breach a secret for more than a year.
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Instead of reporting the stolen data as required by law, Uber paid the hackers $100,000.
The hacker, who was eventually arrested and is in police custody, is said to have gained access to Uber's secure data through “social engineering,” which means manipulating or deceiving someone, often with email or phone calls, to gain access to personal or financial information.
Uber contends that the Lapsus$ hacking group is responsible for a computer network breach after a hacker broke into its internal systems last week. “They pretty much have full access to Uber,” Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs, told The New York Times.
Booking Fake RidesPerhaps one of the most widespread Uber scandals, the earliest days of Uber were tainted by the sabotage of other ride-sharing apps. Uber drivers, employees, and managers would schedule rides on other apps to book them and then cancel at the last minute.
In September, ridesharing company Uber disclosed that hackers had stolen the personal information of about 57 million customers and drivers. The days following the attack were full of speculation around how the attacker – allegedly a 17 year old – was able to gain access to the systems.
“Uber is a company that's probably never raised so much cash and had such big losses,” he says. The issue goes to the heart of the ride-sharing market, which is flooded with competitors. “The taxi services they are looking to disrupt or replace simply aren't profitable without regulation.
The company was fined $148 million in 2018 -- the biggest data-breach fine in history at the time -- for violation of state data breach notification laws.
Uber recently agreed to pay $8.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with California drivers who claimed they were misclassified as independent contractors, rather than employees. The U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California approved the settlement on July 21.
They found private authentication information that Uber engineers had accidentally exposed publicly on GitHub, a site many engineers and companies use to store code and track projects. The attack began when hackers got their hands on Uber user data stored on an Amazon server.
Uber's 2019-2020 Safety Report states that 99.9% of all Uber rides are completed without incident. The 78-page report stated Uber dealt with 3,824 incidents of severe sexual assault and misconduct in the U.S., including that 20 people were killed in assaults.
Yes, for the most part Uber is quite safe for all riders, but there are always risks involved with getting into any car, whether it's an Uber, a taxi, or your own car. Here's how to mitigate those risks. First, sit right behind the driver. It's easier to find off an attack from someone's blind spot.
Uber has been competing fiercely with other ride-hailing services and traditional taxi companies, resulting in lower prices. The company has been subsidizing rides to attract more customers and gain market share, which has resulted in a significant loss of revenue.
The most recent Uber data breach occurred in April 2023, when Uber's law firm informed drivers that their sensitive data had been stolen in a data breach. As of October 2023, there have been no reported Uber data breaches since this incident.
What happened, exactly? Hackers breached 57 million Uber users' and drivers' accounts and demanded $100,000 to delete their copy of the stolen data. This includes names, phone numbers, email addresses and more than 600,000 US drivers' licence numbers.
At that time, Uber had recently disclosed to the FTC that it had been the victim of a data breach in 2014 (“2014 Data Breach”) and that the breach related to the unauthorized access of approximately 50,000 consumers' personal information, including their names and driver's license numbers.