Last October 2016, the company suffered from a data breach and they also paid the extortion amount of $100,000 to hackers to delete the stolen data and keep quiet.
All this has been done without informing the government and affected users.
There's no evidence the data was abused, Uber said.
"I will not make excuses for it," Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO of Uber) said in a statement.
Accordingly, Uber has fired chief security officer Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies, senior lawyer Craig Clark, for playing key roles in covering up the truth. It's also asking former National Counterterrorism Center director Matt Olsen for help structuring Uber's security processes and has stepped up its fraud monitoring for the affected accounts. Drivers in particular are getting free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.
Hackers stole personal data including names, email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as the names and driver’s license numbers of about 600,000 drivers in the United States.
But the company said that sensitive information like location details, credit card details, Bank account numbers, social security numbers, etc... had not been affected by the breach.