Drivers who work for Uber may soon get a letter saying their licence details are in criminals’ hands. The leak did not come from Uber’s own systems: a company that handled some of its data was hacked in October, and the stolen material included driver’s licence information.
The company behind it is Fireworks AI, a service developers use to run open AI models, according to TechCrunch’s own reporting. Uber named only “Fireworks.ai” as the vendor, and pointed other questions to that company. It did not say how many drivers are getting notices, so the true number of affected people is unknown.
Uber’s notices went this week to attorneys general in several US states, California among them. They say Fireworks warned Uber on 9 October that attackers had taken internal credentials and then used them to get at Uber’s data. No overall count is given. TechCrunch went through the filings and found three state totals: 2,567 licences in Massachusetts, 3,430 in South Carolina and 1,873 in Rhode Island. Illinois was told that residents were affected but not how many, and California drivers were notified without a figure.
The Fireworks hack is not new. It disclosed its own intrusion in October, and Notion says it lost data in the same attack. Fireworks says the culprits are after profit: they want LLM access tokens to sell on. Its only comment so far is a short acknowledgement of the breach, with no answers on its scale.
Uber has been here before this year. Data from Uber Freight, its freight-booking business, was claimed by an extortion gang after a separate incident.
