Uber pays 148m over data breach cover-up

NewsBharati    28-Sep-2018
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Mumbai, September 28: Ride-hailing firm Uber is paying 148 million dollars to settle legal action over a cyber-attack that exposed data from 57 million customers and drivers.

 

The massive breach happened in 2016 but Uber sought to hide it from regulators. The company paid the hackers behind the intrusion 100,000 dollar to the data they grabbed from Uber's cloud servers.

The payment settles action brought by the US government and 50 states over Uber's failure to disclose details of the data loss.

Uber revealed some information about the breach in November 2017 and admitted that it should have been more open about the attack.

The personal data from 57 million Uber accounts also included information about 600,000 driving licence numbers.

The data breach affected 50 million riders and 7 million drivers; around 600,000 driver license numbers for U.S. drivers were also included in the breach.

Uber’s response and cover up of the breach led to the firing of Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer at the time. Uber didn’t report the incident that occurred in October 2016. Instead, the company paid hackers $100,000 to get rid of the evidence and keep the data breach a secret.