Uber Security Chief Faces Two Felony Charges For Hiding Breach

August 26, 2020

A complaint filed in federal court in California on Aug. 20 charges Uber’s former security chief with organizing a cover-up of a breach in which the personal data of 57 million Uber passengers was stolen. He allegedly delivered a $100,000 payoff to the hackers to hide the breach. He is charged with obstructing justice and concealing a felony An Uber spokesman defended his actions, and said the decision to reveal the breach to the DOJ a year later was the right way to handle the incident. He said Uber’s legal team, not the security officer, was responsible for deciding whether and to whom the matter should be disclosed. The breach was never disclosed to the FTC, which was investigating Uber for a 2014 breach when it occurred. In 2016 the security officer received an email from a hacker who claimed to have found a “major vulnerability in uber,” that allowed him to dump the company’s entire database. In both cases, hackers got into Uber’s Amazon cloud servers, where the company stored data on drivers and customers. According to the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, hackers hacked companies other than Uber as a result of the cover-up, which delayed law enforcement’s response.

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