A hacker hacked into Uber’s system and took full control, but employees still thought it was just a joke.
Recently, a young hacker attacked the system of technology car company Uber. This hacker not only took full control, but also flaunted his achievements on the company’s intranet.
According to the post, it looks like the hacker did it just for fun. This person also said that he had obtained some source code as well as personal information and was able to sell them on the black market.
This hacker attacked the PowerShell scripts used to automatically control tasks on computers running Windows operating systems and contain information about accessing Uber’s system. Not stopping, young hackers continue to attack Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform – 2 cloud storage services where Uber stores their data.
However, before the attack, Uber employees thought it was a silly joke. Because, somehow, in the internal messaging network between employees, there are constantly messages announcing that their system is “about to be attacked”:
“I’m a hacker here, your system is about to be attacked by me.”
The series of messages was spread on Twitter, the hacker tried to inform the staff about the incident in advance but no one seemed to care. Even Uber employees thought this was someone’s joke and responded by sending stickers such as sirens, popcorn, danger signs, etc.
A representative of Uber on September 16 admitted the attack on the company. The spokesman said:
“We had to suspend the system and blockade the internal network for a short time, and law enforcement agencies have been investigating the incident.”
Corben Leo – a cybersecurity expert then invited this hacker to participate in an interview. It turned out that the hacker who attacked the entire system of a large technology car company was only 18 years old, he said he used social engineering methods – non-technical attacks, stealing personal information of employees to log into the system. and corporate intranet.
This hacker also said that he did it just for fun and tried to see how modern the security systems of technology companies are:
“I wanted to test their security system, it seems that it is still quite weak and vulnerable. I also suggested to Uber’s management that they should raise the salaries of the drivers.”
Social engineering is a form of cyber attack that experts consider to be quite popular today. Hackers will influence the human factor to break the security system, then steal personal information to serve larger attacks. At the same time, experts also said that although this method sounds quite simple, it is extremely effective and will be used by hackers for a long time.
JC Carruthers, President of cybersecurity company Snowfensive said:
“When hackers attack, it’s very difficult for us to fix, because no one can fix a human.”
Uber is an American multinational company specializing in providing transportation services through high-tech applications, which appeared in Vietnam in the years 2017-2018.
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