Uber Drivers’ Data Gets Breached

Ride-hailing outfit Uber inadvertently released data tied to hundreds of its drivers, a deluge that included everything from scans of drivers’ licenses, Social Security numbers and other data. Motherboard, citing other sources, said that the leak was disclosed by drivers on Tuesday (Oct. 13) on the heels of a new app release by the company for its drivers. Motherboard reported that the app had the dual aim of providing more data about drivers to the company and more data about the service from Uber to its drivers.

The drivers themselves took to alerting social media sites such as Reddit, reported Motherboard. “I have hundreds of drivers’ licenses on my screen right now,” wrote one user.

“We were notified about a bug impacting a fraction of our U.S. drivers earlier this afternoon,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement to the site. “Within 30 minutes, our security team had fixed the issue.”

The site quantified the breach a bit, stating that the company disclosed information that was related to 674 drivers in the U.S. In sum total, less than 1,000 documents were released. The data itself was visible to drivers logged into their accounts at the time.

Thus far, said Uber, no data had landed in malicious hands.

The latest data slip came in the wake of other security headlines surrounding the company, including a security flaw fixed by the company that allowed hackers to access accounts even after passwords had been changed (and there’s that spate of violent international protests, too). And as reported earlier in the year, complaints circulated that users were charged for trips they had not made, even being charged for trips that were made when they were not even local to the trip that had been billed. In another example of tech disservice to the service company, Motherboard reported that several Uber accounts had been up for sale on the Internet, having been accessed via stolen login data.

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