Ride hailing giant Uber disclosed Thursday it’s responding to a cybersecurity incident involving a breach of its network and that it’s in touch with law enforcement authorities.
The hack is said to have forced the company to take its internal communications and engineering systems offline as it investigated the extent of the breach.
The publication said the malicious intruder compromised an employee’s Slack account, and leveraged it to broadcast a message that the company had “Suffered a data breach,” in addition to listing internal databases that’s supposed to have been compromised.
It came under scrutiny for failing to properly disclose a 2016 data breach affecting 57 million riders and drivers, and ultimately paying off the hackers $100,000 to hide the breach.
Federal prosecutors in the U.S. have since charged its former security officer, Joe Sullivan, with an alleged attempted cover-up of the incident, stating he had “Instructed his team to keep knowledge of the 2016 breach tightly controlled.” Sullivan has contested the accusations.
The latest breach also comes as the criminal case against Sullivan goes to trial in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
