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In June 2016, Uber paid Finnish security researcher Jouko Pynnönen $10,000 for reporting an authentication bypass in a third-party OneLogin SAML single sign-on (SSO) plugin used on Uber WordPress sites. Pynnönen demonstrated access to accounts, including an administrator account; the report described further attacks as possible, not as attacks that had actually occurred. This was a historical bug bounty, separate from Uber’s later-revealed 2016 data breach.

What vulnerability did Pynnönen report?

The flaw was in a OneLogin SAML SSO plugin for WordPress—not software that Uber itself had written. SecurityWeek reported that an attacker could bypass authentication and access accounts by supplying or guessing relevant role or account information. Pynnönen demonstrated subscriber-level access on eng.uber.com and administrator access on newsroom.uber.com. He also identified seven Uber subdomains using WordPress and the vulnerable plugin, according to SecurityWeek’s June 6, 2016 report.

Why did Uber pay the maximum $10,000?

Uber had announced a public bug bounty program in March 2016, with rewards of up to $10,000 for critical issues. Pynnönen’s demonstrated administrator access made the report more consequential than a flaw limited to low-privilege access. SecurityWeek reported that Uber considered the access capable of enabling further attacks, including possible arbitrary code execution on team.uberinternal.com. That was a potential escalation, not evidence that code execution or a broader compromise took place.

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Uber’s launch announcement said its private beta had involved more than 200 researchers and nearly 100 bugs found and fixed. Those were figures for the beta, not results from the public program. The company described the public reward ceiling in its March 22, 2016 launch post.

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How did Uber’s bug bounty program change?

In an August 2016 retrospective, Uber said that during the public program’s first 100 days it received 2,030 reports, found and fixed 161 security flaws, and paid $345,120.48. About 20% of reports were duplicates, and mean first response time was 23 hours and 51 minutes. These are historical figures from that period, not current program metrics. The retrospective also said 16.1% of submissions concerned WordPress sites.

On August 11, 2016, Uber removed most of its WordPress sites from bounty scope, saying they were outside its infrastructure and rarely held Uber customer or employee data. The company said it would honor earlier submissions. Its explanation was that the highest-impact vulnerabilities involved services in production infrastructure that handled user data. See Uber’s first-100-days retrospective.

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Was this the same incident as Uber’s 2016 data breach?

No. The $10,000 payment was a reward to a researcher for reporting a software vulnerability through Uber’s bug bounty program. In separate 2018 congressional testimony, Uber CISO John Flynn described a different incident in which people who had accessed archived databases and files in Uber’s AWS environment demanded a six-figure payment. Flynn characterized that incident as unlike a typical bug bounty scenario. The testimony is available from the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee.

Special offer. See more information about Outbyte and uninstall instructions. Please review EULA and Privacy policy.

The $10,000 figure belongs to Uber’s 2016 program terms. Flynn’s testimony and Uber’s responses to Senate questions say bounty amounts were at Uber’s discretion; neither establishes the program’s current cap or terms. The historical reports also do not establish the plugin’s present-day vulnerability status.

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