If your account got hacked, isn’t that something you’d like to be immediately aware of right away? Unfortunately for Uber, the company is only now disclosing a year later that back in 2016, they experienced a massive data breach that saw 57 million user data stolen by hackers, according to a report from Bloomberg.
According to the report, the data breach took place back in October 2016, meaning that it has been a little over a year since it happened. The data stolen included names, email addresses, and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders from around the world, as well as 7 million drivers, 600,000 of which are US driver’s license numbers.
However Uber has reassured users that data such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, trip location details, and so on were not compromised, although we’re not sure how comforting that is given that pretty much everything else was exposed. The report goes on to claim that Uber’s chief security officer and one of his deputies (both have since been let go from the company) tried to keep the breach under wraps by paying the hackers $100,000.
In a statement by Dara Khosrowshahi, who is Uber’s new CEO, “None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it. We are changing the way we do business.” Clearly this is not the end of it as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has since launched an investigation into the hack.
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