Uber hacker revealed: Aged 20 and living at home with mummy

In a report by Reuters it's been revealed that it was a 20 year old man from Florida who was responsible for the major hack that compromised 52million accounts at Uber technologies Inc. A payment of $100,000 was issued to the hacker to destroy the data through a program called "bug bounty" which is normally used to identify much smaller code vulnerabilities. Payments made through this program are to reward security researchers who find and report flaws in Uber's software. It's not yet clear who at Uber authorised the payment, but one former executive from Hackerone, the host company of the bug bounty service, said a payment of $100,000 would be extremely unusual, stating payments through this service would normally range from $5,000 to $10,000.

Hackerone hosts the bug bounty program but has no say and no management in deciding who gets paid and for what amount. A source said the hacker was living with his mother at the time in a small home trying to help pay the bills, which is why Uber's security team did not want to pursue prosecution as he did not appear to pose any further threat the the company. It's believed the hacker paid an accomplice to gain access to GitHub, a site used by programmers to store code. This access did not involve any data breach.