Uber CEO, Mr Dara Khosrowshahi, yesterday, revealed that the ride-hailing company, back in 2016 concealed a cyber-attack which involved hackers access to data of 57 million Uber drivers and customers.
The company thereafter silently paid-off the hackers with a fee reported to be about $100,000 to delete all stolen information. According to Bloomberg, Uber's former CEO, Mr Kalanick knew about the situation and decided not to report the breach or make it public.
Information including driver’s licence numbers and customers’ names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers were accessed in the cyber attack.
Of the 57 million, 600,000 drivers were affected, with their names and licence details downloaded by the hackers.
Uber said outside forensics "have not seen any indication that trip location history, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, social security numbers or dates of birth were downloaded".
"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," chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. He was not CEO at the time, having joined in September.
The chief security officer of Uber, Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies have been fired for the part they played in covering the attack.
Uber has been trailed with several ups and downs this year, one of which is the sexual harassment and gender discrimination allegations laid on its co-founder and former chief, Mr Travis Kalanick and other excutives by an employee.
This and many other previous issues lead to him stepping down as CEO and also lead to the appointment of Mr. Khosrowshahi, former CEO of Expedia as the new boss in September of 2017.
Uber also recently had its London license revoked and the company is currently working towards getting back its London operation license where it presently has about 3.5 million users.
Via
No comments:
Post a Comment