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An 18-year-old reportedly hacked Uber's computer systems and sent employees cryptic Slack messages

Sep 16, 2022, 20:23 IST
Business Insider
Uber said it's investigating a cybersecurity incident.David Swanson/Reuters
  • Uber said it is in touch with law enforcement after a hacking incident.
  • Uber employees received a Slack message from an unknown person saying "I am a hacker," per Bloomberg.
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Uber Technologies said late Thursday it was responding to a cybersecurity incident after a hacker sent company employees messages on Slack.

Uber employees received a message from an unknown person on the company Slack that read, "I am a hacker," both Bloomberg and The New York Times reported. The apparent hacker also listed multiple internal databases that they claimed to have accessed, The Times reported.

Uber told Insider it was responding to a "cybersecurity incident" and was in touch with law enforcement.

Uber has taken Slack offline, according to both Bloomberg and The Times.

The hacker's identity remains unknown, but a person claiming to be behind the hack has spoken to The Times as well as some cybersecurity experts.

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Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs, tweeted that the attacker "is claiming to have completely compromised Uber" and had shared screenshots showing that the person had full admin access on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

"This is a total compromise, from what it looks like," Curry told The Times.

The supposed hacker told The Times that he was just 18 and had gotten access to Uber's systems by texting an Uber worker pretending to be a corporate information technology person. He sent The Times images that showed access to lists of Uber emails, cloud storage information, and code.

Uber was also the victim of a huge cyberattack in 2016 that exposed the personal data of 57 million people, including both riders and drivers. The company paid hackers $100,000 to erase the data from their servers. Details of the data breach weren't made public until a year after it happened.

Do you work for Uber? Got a story about the hack? Email this reporter at gdean@insider.com.

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