Uber revealed about a data breach that the ride-hailing company suffered in October last year. They said that the data breach had reportedly affected about 57 million driver and rider accounts.
Information related to their telephone numbers, emails, names had been compromised, the company said and ride-hailing company fired its CEO Joe Sullivan for concealing details regarding the data breach.
The hackers demanded payment from Uber in return for stolen data. Uber paid an amount of $100,000 to ensure complete removal of the data. The issue came to notice recently when the company’s board conducted an investigation into Uber’s past.
The newly elected Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi has decided to take an action on the matter.
The incident happened during the tenure of Travis Kalanick- Uber’s co-founder, who was the chief executive at the time of the breach.
In a blog Khosrowshahi said “None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it”.
According to the company’s account, two individuals downloaded data from a web-based server at another company that provided Uber with cloud-computing services.
Kalanick learnt of the breach a month after it took place, in November 2016, as the company was in negotiations with the US Federal Trade Commission over the handling of consumer data, according to Bloomberg.
Khosrowshahi said he had hired Matt Olsen, former general counsel of the US National Security Agency, to help him figure out how to best guide and structure the company’s security teams and processes.
“While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes,” he said.
“We are changing the way we do business, putting integrity at the core of every decision we make and working hard to earn the trust of our customers,” Khosrowshahi added.