Uber’s widely publicized data leak from two years ago has finally resulted in a fine from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. The penalty would have been 203 times the amount if the leak had occurred this year, after the GDPR era took effect in May. “The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined ride sharing company Uber £385,000 for failing to protect customers’ personal information during a cyber attack,” reads the announcement. In US dollars, that figure translates into around $492,000. As readers may remember, a series of flaws in Uber’s servers let hackers steal personal data of 2.7 million UK customers, as well as the records of almost 82,000 British drivers. The leak exposed full names, email addresses, phone numbers, journey info and even payment data. An investigation revealed that attackers used “credential stuffing” to access the data. As its name implies, the process involves “stuffing” credentials (leaked from a previous breach) into websites until they mat..

A school district in Indiana which had $120,000 transferred from its bank account after its email account was hacked, has failed in an attempt to reclaim the cash. The problems for Lake Ridge Schools began in October 12 2016 when money earmarked for part of a seven million dollar construction project of an athletics complex at Calumet New Tech High School was fraudulently wired to parties unknown. The email account of a business manager tasked with signing off payment requests had been hacked, and a request was made to the BNY Mellon banking giant, asking it to transfer $120,882.83 to several people listed as contractors on the project. At the time, the school district’s business manager was on vacation – a fact not unknown to BNY Mellon as it had received an automated out-of-office email notification a few days earlier. In addition, according to the lawsuit filed by Lake Ridge Schools, the payment request was different from those made previously – it was presented in a different f..

Amid mounting criticism from regulators and users over its data protection practices, Facebook is extending an olive branch to the ethical hacker community, increasing its bug bounty rewards while decreasing the technical overhead. White hats can earn as much as $40,000 for a single account-takeover bug. The announcement was made on the social network’s Bug Bounty page, where Facebook encourages white hat hackers to poke at the platform in every way imaginable to find any undiscovered flaws before bad actors do so. But despite boasting a bug bounty program for over 7 years now, Facebook has been plagued by leaks and attacks. In an effort to thwart these business-wrecking occurrences, the company is now planning to give ethical hackers more incentive to find holes in its platform. From the official announcement: Today, to encourage security researchers to work on finding high impact issues, we are increasing the average payout for account takeover bugs. Our goal is to ensure that thes..