
- The breach occurred in October 2016 and we are just finding out about it now - over a year later.
- The breach contained details of 57 million riders worldwide.
- The information included names, email addresses, and phone numbers – Personally Identifiable Information in the simplest form.
- Approximately 600,000 driver’s licenses were exposed as well and Uber failed to notify any local or state governments of the compromise despite legal obligations to do so
- The company paid a ransom of $100,000 to the hackers to delete the breached information and keep the incident quiet.
- The company has chosen to go public now under new leadership since they were under privacy investigations at the time of the breach and choose to hide the incident.
- The breach occurred due to a failure to secure credentials on a Github site used by engineers. This was then leveraged using stolen privileges to gain access to Amazon AWS instances that support Uber. An archive file was then compromised containing the data.
- Uber maintains none of the stolen information has been used in any other attacks or incidents (for now).
- Uber agreed to an FTC settlement three months ago over privacy concerns, without admitting wrongdoing, and before telling the agency about the breach – thus completely misleading the government!