Ola Cabs Denies Claims User Details, Credit Card Data Compromised

An anonymous hacker going by TeamUnknown on Sunday posted on Reddit claiming to have hacked Ola Cabs. TeamUnknown claims that it was able to acquire Ola Cabs' user database, and describes it as "winning a lottery." It also claims to have sent an email to Ola Cabs to show the weakness, but adds that there has been no response from the company.

As proof, TeamUnknown has included snapshots which show the results of a database query that includes a lot of names that appear to be related to Ola Cabs. There is no further explanation of the methods used, and the Reddit post only states that the hack "was a little tricky, and involved many steps to get to the database." Of course, if this is genuine, then the information sent by the hacker to Ola Cabs could be much more comprehensive.

Ola Cabs has however completely denied that there has been any lapse, or any communication from TeamUknown. The company has issued the following statement:

There has been no security lapse, whatsoever to any user data. The alleged hack seems to have been performed on a staging environment when exposed for one of our test runs. The staging environment is on a completely different network compared to our production environment, and only has dummy user values exclusively used for internal testing purposes. We confirm that there has been no attempt by the hackers to reach out to us in this regard. Security and privacy of customer data is paramount to us at Ola.

On the other hand, TeamUnknown claims it can see unused vouchers, credit card history, and other kinds of personal data which you would obviously not want someone else to see, and Ola is obviously in a position where it would want to deny any leaks. If TeamUnknown doesn't reveal more details soon though, then this could potentially have been a hoax after all.