On September 15th, 2022 Uber started to investigate a situation where their communications and engineering systems were hacked. The hacker had sent images of emails, code repositories and cloud storage to the New York Times. Uber later sent a message to staff saying not to use their messaging system Slack and shortly after employees got a message from the hacker saying,” I announce I am a hacker and Uber suffered a data breach.” HackerOne, a bug bounty platform hired by Uber, announced that there were a lot of stuff compromised and were working on locking down everything, but there were no signs of the hacker doing any damage and it looks like the person was just looking for publicity. The New York Times reported that the hacker was 18 years old and was working on his cybersecurity skills and chose to hack Uber because “they had weak security.” This hack was started due to human error when an employee was fooled.
In this article I will talk about my opinion of the hackers actions. I do feel what the hacker did was wrong by hacking into this giant corporation’s system, but he did not do any damage and basically just reported that there were problems in the system which made it easy for him to breach. He sent out this breach to the New York Times to gain publicity for his work and showed that Uber had to protect their software better. In the end Uber now has a better security system and is more protected against hackers in the future. So what I believe is that the hacker in the beginning was wrong for what he did but in the end he did make the corporation’s security system better and did not attack the company in anyway after getting in, all he did was show them there was a problem that needed to be fixed before another hacker comes and makes a bigger problem. The hackers actions were moral in the end.
The Act Utilitarianism ethical Theory is based on the Greatest Happiness Principle. This principle is about an action which is right or wrong to the extent that it increases the total happiness of the affected party. In this situation the hacker was happy for being able to hack into a big corporation’s security system and Uber was probably unhappy that this situation had come out and were exposed to having a weak system that could be broken into, but in the end were helped and are now happy that these problems were fixed without having any damage done to their system. So in the end under Act Utilitarianism what the hacker did was the right thing to do based on how he acted after hacking Uber’s system because everybody was happy in the end.