Two men have pleaded guilty to hacking Uber and LinkedIn’s Lynda.com educational platform in 2016 and requesting that these companies pay them bug bounties.<\/p>\n
Court documents<\/strong><\/a> show that the hackers used a custom-built GitHub account checker tool to test credentials that were leaked on other websites against GitHub’s user base.<\/p>\n Their goal was specifically to attain the GitHub credentials of corporate employees as this would be more likely to provide them with access to accounts with private and sensitive information.<\/p>\n Upon successfully breaching these accounts, the pair would sift through company GitHub pages in an attempt to find AWS credentials – which they would then use to log into the back end of companies’ systems and acquire their sensitive data.<\/p>\n This strategy reportedly gave the pair access to 57 million Uber users’ details, as well as about 90,000 details from Lynda.com.<\/p>\n The pair then used this data to contact these companies and claim that they had uncovered a vulnerability in their systems – requesting that the companies pay them a bug bounty in Bitcoin.<\/p>\n Uber agreed to this request, and paid the pair $100,000 to keep the breach quiet and not to use the data they had attained.<\/p>\n The cover-up was later made public by new Uber executives, and Uber agreed to pay $148 million in a class-action lawsuit settlement for not immediately disclosing the exploit.<\/p>\n The two hackers each face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.<\/p>\n Two men have pleaded guilty to hacking Uber and LinkedIn’s Lynda.com educational platform in 2016 and then requesting that these companies pay bug bounties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341039,"featured_media":280317,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11253,1565,3666,20853],"class_list":["post-325579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-github","tag-hacker","tag-linkedin","tag-uber"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341039"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325593,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325579\/revisions\/325593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: MTN South Africa grows revenue but loses subscribers<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"