“I announce that I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach,” the message reads.
This was followed by a few dozen reaction emojis that looked like a siren symbol. Because of the hack, people said, some systems were temporarily down, including Slack and internal tools.
Internal screenshots obtained by The Washington Post showed the hacker claiming to have large-scale access to Uber’s corporate networks, suggesting the hacker was motivated by the company’s treatment of its drivers. The person claimed that Uber employees took information from common software used to write new programs.
Uber, when asked for comment on the matter, pointed to a statement it tweeted. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the extent to which internal data may have been compromised.
First the New York Times informed event.
Uber previously violated In 2016, it exposed the personal information of 57 million people worldwide, including names, email addresses and phone numbers. It also includes the driver’s license information of approximately 600,000 US drivers. Two people entered data through a “third-party cloud-based service” used by Uber at the time.
San Francisco-based Uber employs thousands of people worldwide affected by the hacker’s disruption of systems. The company has also come under fire for its treatment of drivers as it struggles to retain contractors.
The hacker posted Uber on HackerOne, a chat feature that facilitates intervention between researchers who report security vulnerabilities and the companies affected by them. Uber and other companies use the service to manage reports of security flaws in their apps and reward researchers who find them.
In that conversation, viewed by The Post, the alleged hacker claimed to have accessed Uber’s Amazon Web Services account.
AWS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
In a subsequent messaging app interview, the alleged hacker told The Post that they hacked the company for fun and could leak the source code “in a few months.”
The person called Uber’s security “terrible.”
Uber workers were caught off guard by the sudden disruption to their workday, with some reacting to the frantic messages as if they were a joke, according to screenshots.
Hacker’s ominous posts SpongeBob character Mr. Krabs, the famous “It’s happening” GIF, and questions about whether or not the situation is a game.
“Sorry to be a stick in the mud, but I think IT will appreciate fewer memes when dealing with a breach,” he said.
