Uber used Bitcoin to pay hackers who held sensitive data for ransom, court documents have confirmed.<\/p>\n
As a result, two men pleaded guilty to charges ofcomputer hacking and extortion, bringing a lengthy legal saga that embroiled Uber and LinkedIn-owned training site Lynda.com in costly data breaches to a close.<\/p>\n
To access the companies servers, the hackers gained access to customer information by using Amazon Web Services logins belonging to Uber and Lynda.com employees.<\/p>\n
They then contacted both companies to extort them for hundreds of dollars worth of Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
At the time, Uber agreed to pay $100,000 in the cryptocurrency. The payment was processed via the tech giants HackerOne bug bounty program, and Uber required the hackers to sign a confidentiality agreement preventing them from using the data and publicly disclosing the security breach.<\/p>\n
Vasile Mereacre, from Canada, and Brandon Glover, from Florida, wereindicted last year after stealing information of 55,000 accounts from Lynda.com, which unlike Uber, refused to pay.<\/p>\n
It was then revealed that both men were also the perpetrators of a 2016 Uber breach that compromised the data of 57 millions users.<\/p>\n
Uber kept the security breach private for over a year, until November 2017, when its new leadership became aware of the cover-up and decided to go public.<\/p>\n
As a result, the company received a hefty $148 million fine and had to agree to 20 years of privacy audits.<\/p>\n
Uber also fired its chief security officer Joe Sullivan, who orchestrated the payments and failed to alert company users about the security breach.<\/p>\n
Published November 1, 2019 15:04 UTC <\/p>\n
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