Uber Says Hackers Stole Drivers' License Data Through AI Vendor Fireworks

In notices filed this week with several state attorneys general, including California's, Uber said a technology provider told it on October 9 that hackers had stolen internal credentials and used them to reach Uber data. TechCrunch named the vendor as Fireworks, and an Uber spokesperson confirmed it. "The notices to drivers are in relation to a security incident impacting one of our third-party vendors, Fireworks.ai, which had access to some Uber data," the spokesperson told the publication.

The breach shows how AI infrastructure vendors are becoming a route into data at the large companies that use them. Notion has also said its data was taken in the Fireworks intrusion, affecting fewer than 1% of its workspaces. The hackers were not mainly after personal data. Fireworks has said the group behind the attack is financially motivated and wanted to sell stolen access to large language models.

Driver Counts So Far

Uber has not said how many people are affected in total. Notices seen by TechCrunch cover driver's licences for 2,567 people in Massachusetts, 3,430 in South Carolina and 1,873 in Rhode Island, almost 7,900 in all. An Illinois filing shows that some residents' licence data was stolen but gives the number as pending. Uber also notified drivers in California without saying how many were affected. The total is likely to grow as more state filings are published.

Fireworks said in a security bulletin, last updated on November 9, that the evidence pointed to a group "financially motivated and aimed at selling tokens from unauthorized access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to illicit routing gateways", a practice known as LLMjacking. No group has publicly claimed the attack.

A Wider Fireworks Breach

The bulletin describes two stages. Fireworks published its first notice on October 9. It later found that a third-party cloud provider hosting its research and development machines had a security incident on October 23, and that an intruder used that access the next day to reach Fireworks development machines and run an unauthorised workload.

Fireworks said the attackers reached resource metadata and customer billing information, including addresses, invoice and payment history, account balances and credit usage. For some customers they also reached incomplete model weights and datasets, and for a limited number of accounts, stored secrets. The company said it does not store payment card numbers. It said its inference service, Training SDK and Nexus product, which keep no customer data by default, showed no detected impact.

Fireworks said it has revoked and replaced credentials, isolated affected systems, switched off self-serve dataset uploads and downloads for some products while it investigates, notified law enforcement and brought in Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 for forensic work. A Fireworks spokesperson did not answer TechCrunch's questions about Uber.

This is the second data breach Uber has disclosed this year. Earlier it reported a security incident at its Uber Freight trucking unit, which an extortion gang said it was behind.

Fireworks says it is contacting customers whose data was affected. Uber's driver notices are still being filed state by state, and these will give the first full count of how many drivers were exposed.