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Severe Breach at Uber Spotlights Hacker Social Deception

By Related Press on September 17, 2022

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The ride-hailing service Uber stated Friday that each one its companies have been operational following what safety professionals are calling a significant knowledge breach, claiming there was no proof the hacker obtained entry to delicate person knowledge.

However the breach, apparently by a lone hacker, put the highlight on an more and more efficient break-in routine involving social engineering: The hacker apparently gained entry posing as a colleague, tricking an Uber worker into surrendering their credentials.

They have been then capable of find passwords on the community that obtained them the extent of privileged entry reserved for system directors.

The potential harm was critical: Screenshots the hacker shared with safety researchers point out they obtained full entry to the cloud-based methods the place Uber shops delicate buyer and monetary knowledge.

It’s not recognized how a lot knowledge the hacker stole or how lengthy they have been inside Uber’s community. Two researchers who communicated straight with the individual — who self-identified as an 18-year-old to one among them — stated they appeared fascinated with publicity. There was no indication they destroyed knowledge.

However recordsdata shared with the researchers and posted broadly on Twitter and different social media indicated the hacker was capable of entry Uber’s most vital inside methods.

“It was actually unhealthy the entry he had. It’s terrible,” stated Corben Leo, one of many researchers who chatted with the hacker on-line.

The cybersecurity neighborhood’s on-line response — Uber additionally suffered a critical 2016 breach — was harsh.

The hack “wasn’t subtle or difficult and clearly hinged on a number of massive systemic safety tradition and engineering failures,” tweeted Lesley Carhart, incident response director of Dragos Inc., which makes a speciality of an industrial-control methods.

Leo stated screenshots the hacker shared confirmed the intruder obtained entry to methods saved on Amazon and Google cloud-based servers the place Uber retains supply code, monetary knowledge and buyer knowledge reminiscent of driver’s licenses.

“If he had keys to the dominion he might begin stopping companies. He might delete stuff. He might obtain buyer knowledge, change folks’s passwords,” stated Leo, a researcher and head of enterprise growth on the safety firm Zellic.

Screenshots the hacker shared — a lot of which discovered their means on-line — confirmed delicate monetary knowledge and inside databases accessed. Additionally broadly circulating on-line: The hacker saying the breach Thursday on Uber’s inside Slack collaboration system.

Leo, together with Sam Curry, an engineer with Yuga Labs who additionally communicated with the hacker, stated there was no indication that the hacker had accomplished any harm or was fascinated with something greater than publicity.

“It’s fairly clear he’s a younger hacker as a result of he desires what 99% of what younger hackers need, which is fame,” Leo stated.

Curry stated he spoke to a number of Uber workers Thursday who stated they have been “working to lock down every thing internally” to limit the hacker’s entry. That included the San Francisco firm’s Slack community, he stated.

In an announcement posted on-line Friday, Uber stated “inside software program instruments that we took down as a precaution yesterday are coming again on-line.”

It stated all its companies — together with Uber Eats and Uber Freight — have been operational and that it had notified regulation enforcement. The FBI stated through e mail that it’s “conscious of the cyber incident involving Uber, and our help to the corporate is ongoing.”

Uber stated there was no proof that the intruder accessed “delicate person knowledge” reminiscent of journey historical past however didn’t reply to questions from The Related Press together with about whether or not knowledge was saved encrypted.

Curry and Leo stated the hacker didn’t point out how a lot knowledge was copied. Uber didn’t suggest any particular actions for its customers, reminiscent of altering passwords.

The hacker alerted the researchers to the intrusion Thursday by utilizing an inside Uber account on the corporate’s community used to submit vulnerabilities recognized by way of its bug-bounty program, which pays moral hackers to ferret out community weaknesses.

After commenting on these posts, the hacker offered a Telegram account deal with. Curry and different researchers then engaged them in a separate dialog, the place the intruder offered the screenshots as proof.

The AP tried to contact the hacker on the Telegram account, however obtained no response.

Screenshots posted on-line appeared to verify what the researchers stated the hacker claimed: That they obtained privileged entry to Uber’s most important methods by way of social engineering.

The obvious state of affairs:

The hacker first obtained the password of an Uber worker, seemingly by way of phishing. The hacker then bombarded the worker with push notifications asking they affirm a distant log-in to their account. When the worker didn’t reply, the hacker reached out through WhatsApp, posing as a fellow employee from the IT division and expressing urgency. In the end, the worker caved and confirmed with a mouse click on.

Social engineering is a well-liked hacking technique, as people are typically the weakest hyperlink in any community. Youngsters used it in 2020 to hack Twitter and it has extra just lately been utilized in hacks of the tech corporations Twilio and Cloudflare, stated Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Safety, which makes a speciality of coaching employees to not fall sufferer to social engineering.

“The exhausting fact is that almost all orgs on the planet may very well be hacked within the actual means Uber was simply hacked,” Tobac tweeted. In an interview, she stated “even tremendous tech savvy folks fall for social engineering strategies daily.”

“Attackers are getting higher at by-passing or hi-jacking MFA (multi-factor authentication),” stated Ryan Sherstobitoff, a senior risk analyst at SecurityScorecard.

That’s why many safety professionals advocate using so-called FIDO bodily safety keys for person authentication. Adoption of such {hardware} has been spotty amongst tech corporations, nevertheless.

The hack additionally highlighted the necessity for real-time monitoring in cloud-based methods to higher detect intruders, stated Tom Kellermann of Distinction Safety. “Rather more consideration should be paid to defending clouds from inside” as a result of a single grasp key can sometimes unlock all their doorways.

Some consultants questioned how a lot cybersecurity has improved at Uber because it was hacked in 2016.

Its former chief safety officer, Joseph Sullivan, is at the moment on trial for allegedly arranging to pay hackers $100,000 to cowl up that high-tech heist, when the non-public info of about 57 million clients and drivers was stolen.

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