Half of UK adults want to stop using the Uber app following breach

The news that ride hailing service Uber has suffered, and covered up, a major hack means that millions of people could unknowingly have had their data put at risk.

Data security company Egress Software Technologies ran a flash survey of 500 UK adults this morning to find their reactions to the story.

Over half admitted that they weren't aware of the situation prior to being asked by Egress, however, having been made aware of the fact that Uber tried to cover up the breach, more than half (53 percent) of respondents say it has made them want to stop using the taxi app.

When asked what measures they would take to protect their data following the breach, more than half (52 percent) say they would either delete the app or would start using another, similar service, while a third (33 percent) say they would take the sensible step of changing their passwords.

However, more than a fifth (21 percent) of respondents felt that such incidents probably happen all the time and so Uber's situation didn't bother them and over a quarter (27 percent) felt it was annoying but wouldn’t stop them from using the service.

"Uber has had a slew of controversies surrounding it for some time now and at a time when the company is relying on public opinion to help support continued operations in London through petitions etc, this incident is likely to do it no favors -- as the results of our flash poll show," says Tony Pepper, co-founder and CEO of Egress. "Interestingly here it’s the fact that Uber covered up the breach that seems to have got people’s backs up, clearly showing how important honesty is when dealing with such incidents. The simple fact is that when this kind of thing happens, your customer base and bottom line are going to suffer so it has to be dealt with responsibly. While, in the UK, Uber has fewer direct competitors than in other parts of the world, controversies like this are going to drive customers away."

The breach seems to have occurred via development platform Github where hackers accessed the accounts of two Uber engineers who had uploaded the data to online storage for testing. This cavalier treatment of customer data has come in for industry criticism.

"Sadly, it's all too common that developers are allowed to copy live production data for use in development, testing and QA. This data is almost never monitored or secured, and as we can see here, it is often stored in various locations and is often easily accessed by nefarious actors," says Terry Ray, CTO of data protection company Imperva. "Some of the questions that should be answered include: Why did engineers have access to 57 million records of personally identifiable information? Did they go through an approval work flow to move that data online? Did Uber security have any monitoring in place to alert them when such vast amounts of data were accessed? Controls to alert on suspicious data access do exist, but my guess is that they were not used, which is all too typical in today's enterprises."

Will you stop using Uber as a result of the breach? Let us know in the comments.

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