Uber paid Florida man to keep data breach secret: sources

San Francisco

A 20-YEAR-OLD Florida man was responsible for the large data breach at Uber Technologies Inc last year and was paid by Uber to destroy the data through a so-called "bug bounty" programme normally used to identify small code vulnerabilities, three people familiar with the events have told Reuters.

Uber announced on Nov 21 that the personal data of 57 million users, including 600,000 drivers in the United States, were stolen in a breach that occurred in October 2016, and that it paid the hacker US$100,000 to destroy the information. But the company did not reveal any information about the hacker or how it paid him the money.

Uber made the payment last year through a programme designed to reward security researchers wh…