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Uber’s Vast Data Breach Lands £385,000 Fine

Uber data breach

British and Dutch Data Protection Regulators have fined Taxi firm Uber over failing to inform customers of a mass data breach which lead to the private details of customers and drivers being lost.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined the multi-national mobile taxi-booking operator £385,000 for failing to protect customer and driver data in a large scale breach which happened in October and November of 2016. The breach has put Uber’s customers and drivers at an increased risk of serious fraud against them.

“A series of avoidable data security flaws.”

The full data breach covered more than 57 million customers and drivers worldwide. According to the Financial Times, the records of almost 82,000 drivers in the UK have been compromised with journey details, their amounts of pay and their tip collections at risk. In a very small number of cases

The ICO described the data breach as “a series of avoidable data security flaws.” Going on to say they allowed the personal data of nearly 3 million UK customers to be accessed and downloaded from their cloud-based storage systems. The data taken from Uber’s cloud storage included customer’s full names, email addresses, phone numbers and in some cases their sign-up locations.

Uber took the decision not to notify the people affected by the breach, only to monitor their accounts for unusual activity for 12 months following the cyber attack. This was compounded following information revealing Uber paid the hackers $100,000 to keep the story out of the media and destroy the data they had obtained. The ICO was also critical of this decision.

Data Security Breach

With stories such as this in the media, it highlights the importance of reliable and secure business cloud backup for companies of any size. From organisations of the size which Uber take or a sole trader, many businesses now take personal details online. Regardless of the size of your customer base, having a detrimental data breach such as this can not only have vast impacts on customers susceptibility to fraud but can greatly damage your brand.

When a business backup data to a cloud-based server, they have to know data is secure. We understand that data of any variety is important to the success of your business.

Every piece of data you sent to a Safe Data Storage server is protected by encryptions to ensure your data remains your and only yours. Your data will be backed up to our own servers based right here in the UK. Safe Data Storage will never store your files on a server which is not our own.

To prevent an Uber scale data breach with your business, explore our business cloud backup solutions and how Safe Data Storage can help to keep you secure from a data breach.

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