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Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

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Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised Uber doesn't have their engineers set up 2FA for GitHub. Super simple to implement and require organization-wide[1] and would have prevented this. Then again, not storing credentials in GitHub would also have prevented this . . . [1] https://help.github.com/articles/requiring-two-factor-authen...

2FA doesn't help if they used SSH access

It’s also required for SSH access to Uber’s servers.

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#552
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you're not expecting people to ever pay it, because you've set it high enough to be a solid disincentive. If people are actually paying it regularly, you obviously haven't set it high enough. This is also common when quoting freelance projects you don't really want to do.

This. I'm an independent consultant, too. There are things clients want me to do that I don't want to do and on terms that I don't want to do it on. However, if there's a real pinch and they have no other choice than hire me for that kind of gig: I'll do it, but you'll pay me my "I really don't want you to hire me for this" price. I'd rather they not hire me in those cases, but just telling them no is more alienating…

British builders call this a "fuck off quote".

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#553

At what point can we just let a company die? Is there even such a line to be crossed anymore? Personal data leaks and illegal cover-ups, Greyball, utter disregard for regulations, IP theft, a culture systemic harassment and sexism, etc etc etc. Uber just needs to die so that the rest of us can have some semblance of faith in the system left.

The "success at any cost" mentality may have some costs, in retrospect

Definitely cost me my personal data!

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#554
post #271
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me quote from your original comment: > people don't actually care. It's just virtue signaling. You're making claims about their underlying motivation, and dismissing their actions as just virtue signaling. "They're not doing A, they're only doing B" Showing the presence of B is not sufficient to demonstrate the absence of A. Second, you haven't actually shown that they're virtue signaling. Note that your definiti…

Hmmm, lots of good points here. > You're making claims about their underlying motivation, and dismissing their actions as just virtue signaling. This is true. > Showing the presence of B is not sufficient to demonstrate the absence of A. This is also true. > Second, you haven't actually shown that they're virtue signaling. Note that your definition specifically includes intent: "publicly expressing opinions or sentim…

Thanks for engaging in good faith. The internet could use more of that.

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#555
post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't check secrets into VCS, folks! " I suppose? But at this point they have your code base . You are so owned at that point.

Yeah, but hopefully they can't do much if they just have your code base. If the secrecy of your code is the only thing stopping hackers from exploiting you, you're missing some gaping holes in your infrastructure. With that said, nothing wrong with using secrecy as a additional barrier, but shouldn't be the only, and if it's not the only, you're not "so owned at that point".

If they have access to the code inside Github, would they have been able to push their own changes to the code without anyone noticing?

Maybe pushing something that was labeled as a "security patch" but was actually a disguised vulnerability? I could see not even checking into that, and just downloading it. But I'm on a small team. Do big companies have procedures to protect against this?

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#556
post #396
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github 2FA has been part of the first-day training/laptop setup for a while now (I joined in may) and there's security-related training in place as well. I was told there are also scanners in place now that check repos, gists, etc for secrets for exactly this type of mistake. One snippet of the email the article didn't mention was that Sullivan's firing happened pretty much right after Dara learned of the breach and…

Uber will not tolerate unethical behavior, you got to be joking!?!?

I think many people don't realize this, but the majority of the leadership team from like a year or two ago is now gone, including Travis.

Also, Uber has been hiring a lot of new people - the ratio of new people vs old timers is really high. I'm obviously just one anecdata point, but I believe new hires (and a lot of old timers) want Uber to be an ethical company, and many have joined the company specifically to tackle that challenge. One great example that comes to mind was when one board member made a sexist remark on an all-hands meeting a few months ago and by the end of that same day, Liane Hornsey (who had just joined as the new head of HR) had him give up his seat.

There's a big push towards trying to make things right, with the holden report, the 180 days of change campaign, the implementation of new training courses, anonymous complaint hotline for employees, etc. And the unspoken message right now is pretty clear: inappropriate conduct _will_ get you fired, even if you are the head of your org.

Obviously there's still a lot of work to be done, but I think we're at least in the right track now.

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#557
post #529
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Just” leaking full source could be enough to destroy a lot of IP-based companies. A lot of companies stay wealthy because their IP is so huge than nobody can afford to develop competitive alternatives anymore (Adobe, Microsoft Office, Salesforce etc). Some of them have actual “secret sauce” that they cannot afford to share (suggestion engines, biotech processes etc). Even a service like Github, which relies on other…

> Adobe, Microsoft Office, Salesforce I don't think either of those companies would cease to exist if their code bases leaked online today. Sure, someone might get something to build, but there is surely A LOT of things around the code bases to support all of this, which means the code bases would mostly serve as a study for software in general (and finding holes obviously). Github is a bit unfair comparision, as the…

> I don't think either of those companies would cease to exist if their code bases leaked online today.

A serious Photoshop clone that can match PS feature for feature would wipe Adobe, people cannot wait to get rid of them. 25% of MS revenues comes directly from Office and another 25% from Windows or other commercial offerings that are basically driven by Office, so yeah, MS would survive a working Office clone, but they would be deeply wounded; they pulled all the dirty tricks in the book to keep competitors from integrating seamlessly... having the real code responsible for their formats available in the open, would hurt them massively.

These companies are as big as they are because they did the right moves at the right time, and now they have spent so many man-decades on their codebases that nobody can realistically hope to catch up starting from scratch; but having a good look at their codebases would likely kickstart oozes of competitors with very good chances to replace them in a very short time.

> For the general company, I think leaking access credentials is a much bigger (but easier to fix) problem than leaking the source code itself.

Credentials are a mean to an end: protecting something. If you are Ashley Madison, your valuable IP is your database of users and their preferences; but if you are Microsoft or Adobe, what credentials are protecting is your source code. Adobe survived their user credentials being leaked, like so many other companies. They would have hurt much more had they leaked the entire PS codebase.

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#558
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github 2FA has been part of the first-day training/laptop setup for a while now (I joined in may) and there's security-related training in place as well. I was told there are also scanners in place now that check repos, gists, etc for secrets for exactly this type of mistake. One snippet of the email the article didn't mention was that Sullivan's firing happened pretty much right after Dara learned of the breach and…

Just curious, are you speaking as an Uber employee

Well, I am one, but the things I say here are my individual opinions and observations. I just think that as an insider I get some insights that you'd normally not get from the media, and I figured I'd share them.

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but think of all of the private keys and tokens used in automation servers (think CI) for pulling down source. Those don't have 2FA - because they don't login - but they have full access to most source. In an organization of about 200 engineers across various products, 1000+ github repos, and 10 or so different CI systems. We enforce 2FA at github. I can still easily see how someone could easily gain access to s…

> In an organization of about 200 engineers across various products, 1000+ github repos Wait, what? That's 5+ repos per engineer. What on earth would warrant that level of granularity? I've only worked once in my career in a place that used more than 2-3 repositories total, and that was a "MegaTechGiant" with thousands of engineers.

How about, if Uber stores all data across those git repositories (1000+)? Perhaps they use git as a multi-versioned data storage? Perhaps better than Kafka (event sourcing thing?). Just a thought :)

Re: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57M People

#560
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github 2FA has been part of the first-day training/laptop setup for a while now (I joined in may) and there's security-related training in place as well. I was told there are also scanners in place now that check repos, gists, etc for secrets for exactly this type of mistake. One snippet of the email the article didn't mention was that Sullivan's firing happened pretty much right after Dara learned of the breach and…

Are you using Github Enterprise? Is it available from outside of the uber network?

We primarily use private phabricator and gitolite instances for internal stuff, but we also have OSS things in regular public GH repos. We do have a few private GH repos, but AFAIK, you're not supposed to version control internal stuff on GH, and there's no real reason to use a private GH repo, except for legal review prior to open sourcing.

I don't have any context on why someone would have put production secrets in a GH repo. If it had happened in my team, I would definitely have sounded the alarm at code review.

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