20-year-old Florida man was behind Uber hack
A 20-year-old Florida man was responsible for the data breach at Uber last year, and was paid $100,000 to destroy the information, Reuters reported Wednesday.
But it would appear that Uber used its bug bounty as a means to pay-off the hacker, who a source described as "living with his mom in a small home trying to help pay the bills" and noted Uber didn't want to pursue any legal action due to perceiving the man as no longer posing a threat to it.
Sources familiar with the hack told Reuters the payment was made through a program created to reward bug hunters who report flaws in a company's software. Reuters did not discover the name of the hacker.
As per the report, Uber also conducted a forensic analysis of hacker's machine to make sure that no traces of data were left behind. Since that time, CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down and was replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi in August.
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You can potentially understand the panic and attempt to hush it up - especially in light of how much controversy Uber has courted in the past few years - but with the information of so many users at stake who trust the company, this is a bad failure and was a huge mistake which may be extremely hard to recover from. Uber spokesman Matt Kallman declined to comment on the matter.
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Kate Moussouris, a former HackerOne executive, Luta Security founder and bug bounty advocate, said if the payment had been a legitimate bug bounty, it would have been ideal for everyone involved to shout it from the rooftops.
Security professionals said rewarding a hacker who had stolen data also would be well outside the normal rules of a bounty programme, where payments are typically in the $5,000 to $10,000 range.
CEO Marten Mickos said that he could not comment on individual customers' programmes.
At the time of the incident, Uber approached the two hackers and "obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed", and upped the security of the third party cloud-based storage account they had accessed, he added.
Uber's failure to report the breach to regulators, even though it may have felt it had dealt with the problem, was an error, according to people inside and outside the company who spoke to Reuters.
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