Good News, Bad News for Uber

For the mobile ridesharing firm, which demonstrates to us all one more great use of mobile payments, there’s good news and bad news that have recently arrived. The good news is that its recent hacking, that it paid fully six figures to bury, didn’t actually get as far as it might, leaving most of the really sensitive information alone. The bad news is the government has taken an interest in Uber, in an investigatory sense.

So, first the good news: after investigation by cybersecurity firm Mandiant, it was found that the really heavy stuff—credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and Social Security numbers—hadn’t been touched at all. Or at least there was no evidence that it was.

Thus the worst the hackers could have landed was location information, and potentially the encrypted versions of user passwords. Email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and names were likely taken, however. However, even this dark cloud comes with silver lining; there has yet to be evidence of fraud or misuse connected to the information taken.

The bad news, however, remains: based on court documents filed, there is now a federal investigation into Uber itself. While the documents don’t make clear just who’s investigating Uber—the Federal Trade Commission is a likely front-runner—the investigation does exist and has now been publicly confirmed. There are reports that say it’s unrelated to the payoff, and rather may be related to the recent court case between Uber and Waymo, related to matters of trade secrets.

So while there’s certainly good news here, for both Uber and for its customers, there’s a pretty like amount of bad news going into the system too. That may not bode well for Uber going forward, particularly if that investigation goes poorly for them. That in turn could be an opportunity for firms like Lyft, who already pursued a potential advantage in London after Uber lost its taxi license therein. This kind of weakness may well draw in further potential competitors and compound Uber’s problems.

These are likely not happy days at Uber, which now needs to recover from several major stumbles seen in the last couple of months. It can, quite possibly, pull off such a recovery, though only time will tell if it actually does.