Uber’s Secret

November 30, 2017

For most of 2016, hackers had unlimited access to Uber’s user data, but until recently we didn’t know the whys and hows and more annoyingly we were all left wondering why it had taken the story so long to come out. “None of this should have happened, and I will not make any excuses for it,” said Uber’s CEO. “We are changing the way we do business. While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.” Hackers accessed the data through a third-party, cloud-based service. According to Bloomberg, they got into Uber’s GitHub account, a site many engineers and companies use to store code and track projects. There, hackers found the username and password to access Uber user data stored in an Amazon server. Uber even went as far to pay the hackers $100,000 to keep the story quiet. Now under new management, forty-eight states maintain some version of a law that requires companies that suffer a data breach to communicate what happened to consumers. But, do you trust using it?

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