Uber paid 20-year-old Florida man to keep data breach secret
Pentester here.<p>If any pentester would download more data than necessary to prove a bug exists, they would be fired.<p>I don't know whether this person downloaded 57M user records. Maybe it was a 500kb zip file, which would be totally reasonable to grab in a pentest. And then once you realize what it is, you run `srm` on it to ensure it's wiped, then immediately call the client so they can deploy an emergency hotfix and perform forensic analysis to see if the data had already been nabbed.<p>We know he contacted Uber. We don't know whether he said "Give me $100k and I'll delete the data" or "Give me $100k and I'll keep my mouth shut" or if Uber offered him the $100k or any details at all. In this scenario, it's better to assume the best until proven otherwise. And by "proof" I mean "emails showing what was said," not a second-hand news report that attempts to spin it into an easily clickable form.<p>But I suppose it could have gone the other way too, and maybe he did. The point is, it's totally reasonable for Uber to raise the price until he was willing to keep quiet about it. If I ran into this bug in the wild, I would be ethically obliged to report it to you, dear readers, after a reasonable time period. But I suppose certain ethics would take a back seat to $100k in my pocket, and I'm not ashamed of that.<p>But it depends on the data. If we're talking SSNs, that could really screw up peoples' lives, so I don't think I'd be able to be bought. CC numbers I'd probably overlook, since you can't really mess with someone's life by stealing their CC number. They just get refunded. (edit: On the other hand, businesses eat the cost of fraud, so this would probably need to be reported.)<p>The point is, it's a big complex topic and there are a bunch of things we don't know. But above all, if you are ever holding data hostage and demanding money to destroy it, you're not a pentester, you're a chump.<p>edit2: it occurs to me that maybe the 20yo wanted to hold the data in order to prove to the world that the breach really did happen, i.e. his intent was altruistic. I could picture myself doing something misguided like that back when I was 20. But the trick is to keep only a few records at most, and redact everything sensitive. Then tell the truth. The company can't lie and say it didn't happen, since they don't know whether you can prove that it did. And no one is at risk because the data is gone.