The price of compromise! Uber pays hackers $100,000 in bitcoin ransom and is fined $148 million

According to the thenextweb report, Uber has used Bitcoin to pay ransoms to hackers holding sensitive data, according to court documents.

Photo-1524669942788-b616ad1c4a13

Image source:

The two men eventually pleaded guilty to the indicted computer hacker and extortion charges, which also led to a long legal proceedings, and Uber and LinkedIn's training site Lynda.com paid a high data breach.

Hackers hack into their servers by logging in to customer information using Amazon Web Services logins belonging to Uber and Lynda.com employees.

Then they contacted the two companies and blackmailed them for hundreds of dollars worth of bitcoin.

At the time, Uber agreed to pay $100,000 in cryptocurrency. The money was paid through the tech giant's HackerOne bug bounty program, which asked hackers to sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent them from using the data and publicly revealing security holes.

Last year, Vasile Mereacre from Canada and Brandon Glover from Florida were sued after stealing information on 55,000 accounts from Lynda.com. Unlike Uber, Lynda.com refused to pay the ransom.

It was later discovered that the two men were the perpetrators of the 2016 Uber invasion, which revealed data on 57 million users.

Uber kept this security breach for more than a year until November 2017, when its new leadership realized this concealment and decided to make it public.

As a result, Uber was fined $148 million and must undergo a 20-year privacy audit.

Uber also fired its chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, who carefully planned payments to hackers but did not alert corporate users about security breaches.

The New York Times said that the two men, who are scheduled to be sentenced next year, may face a maximum sentence of up to five years in federal prisons and may be fined up to $250,000.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!

Share:

Was this article helpful?

93 out of 132 found this helpful

Discover more

Blockchain

Read the article Bakkt: cryptocurrency of the New York Stock Exchange

At the Bakkt Digital Assets Summit held last week at the New York Stock Exchange, more than 150 investors around the ...

Opinion

Research on the major wallet risks of Binance, KuCoin, and Jump: Are assets stored in large institutions 100% safe?

Undoubtedly, mainstream exchanges and institutions have invested a significant amount of funds and manpower in networ...

Blockchain

The compliance exchange is about to appear in Singapore?

On December 18, 2019, the official website of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (hereinafter referred to as "M...

Policy

🚀 FTX Claims Reach for the Sky: AI Investments Boost Recovery Potential

FTX's investment in AI companies has significantly increased their potential recovery during their bankruptcy procedu...

Blockchain

BiClub realizes full automation of OTC platform and helps build a large-scale digital asset financial service system

In the early hours of Beijing time yesterday, BiClub ( www.biclub.io , WeChat biclubcom) team has completed a key ste...

Market

Interview with Circle CEO by Fortune What role does stablecoin play in the cryptocurrency market?

This article discusses the differences between the cryptocurrency crash in 2022 and the late 1990s internet bubble, t...