On Thursday, a famous ride-share company, Uber, was hacked by an alleged 18-year-old who accessed financial documents and internal employee messages.
The Hack Details
Uber is currently investigating a breach, otherwise known as a social engineering attack, of their extremely sensitive data, including financial documents, internal messages, and perhaps other areas of information. The New York Times reported the hacker is a teenager and 18 years old.
The hacker caused Uber to take several internal systems offline, including communications and engineering systems.
The hacker who claims to have breached Uber systems convinced an Uber employee he was an IT person, whom he was texting. The hacker got them to hand over a password, which allowed him access to Uber’s systems, which is when the breach occurred.
The teenage hacker posted shots of their alleged exploits on Telegram, a popular social media platform, and posted about the hack in Uber’s internal Slack channels that evening. According to the Washington Post, this led a few employees to think it was a hoax.
Slack is a chat and messaging system used among individual users, teams, and companies.
Before the hacker took down Uber’s systems, he sent a Slack message to employees that said, “I announce I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach.” The hacker listed the systems he breached.
The New York Times reported:
“They pretty much have full access to Uber,” said Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs who corresponded with the person who claimed to be responsible for the breach. “This is a total compromise, from what it looks like.”
The Hacker’s Distasteful Message
According to Fortune magazine, when the hacker announced themself on Thursday, he posted a picture of a penis on Uber’s internal websites. The message he posted read, “F**K YOU DUMB WANKERS.”
It is still unclear how long the hacker may have accessed Uber’s data – just because the hacker announced the hack on Thursday does not mean systems were accessed that day.
What is Uber?
Uber, or Uber Technologies, Inc., is a service provider that allows users to rent a car and driver for transportation purposes. Uber is based in San Francisco and has operations in about 72 countries and 10,500 cities, according to data from 2021.
Uber requires users to download their proprietary app to use the ride-sharing service.
Uber has reported law enforcement officials and is investigating the extent of a hack of its computer systems.
According to Fox News, “Uber was breached in 2016 when hackers stole information from 57 million driver and rider accounts, then approached Uber and demanded $100,000 to delete their copy of the data.”
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