Uber camouflaged a data breach for more than a year which affected 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc.
According to Bloomberg, the company's former chief executive Travis Kalanick knew about the breach over a year ago. This week, the firm ousted Kalanick and one of his loyal for keeping the hack under wraps and paying a $100,000 to the hackers.
"I recently learned that in late 2016 we became aware that two individuals outside the company had inappropriately accessed user data stored on a third-party cloud-based service that we use," wrote Uber’s current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. "You may be asking why we are just talking about this now, a year later. I had the same question, so I immediately asked for a thorough investigation of what happened and how we handled it."
Khosrowshahi said that the data hackers were able to download files containing a significant amount of information, and compromised data includes names, e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers of 57 million customers, and driver’s license numbers of around 600,000 drivers, whereas credit card numbers, bank account details, and Social Security numbers hadn’t been breached.
In a press release, the firm wrote "At the time of the incident, we took immediate steps to secure the data and shut down further unauthorized access by the individuals. We subsequently identified the individuals and obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed. We also implemented security measures to restrict access to and strengthen controls on our cloud-based storage accounts."
However, Uber did not reveal the details of the hack, which countries were affected by this hack.