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The ride-sharing company used Ripley at least two dozen times in 2015 and 2016 in countries including Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg.
In one case Ripley was deployed to prevent Canadian tax investigators, who believed Uber had violated tax laws, from collecting evidence even though they had a warrant. As soon as they burst into the Montreal office, Uber staff paged the headquarters in San Francisco who remotely logged everyone in that office off their devices.
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Uber first developed the system, initially called the “unexpected visitor protocol”, after a police raid in its Brussels office, where Belgian law enforcement officers accessed the company’s financial documents, payments system and worker data. A court order subsequently forced Uber to shut down its service for operating without proper licenses.
It was nicknamed Ripley after a line spoken by the protagonist in the Alien movies, who decides that the only way to destroy all the murderous extraterrestrials is to destroy their entire habitat. “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure,” she says. The line has been reappropriated by information security teams to describe an extreme response to a detected threat.
Uber downplayed the tool and said it was common practice to have such software to remotely change passwords or lock devices in the event they were lost or stolen.
“Like every company with offices around the world, we have security procedures in place to protect corporate and customer data,” said an Uber spokeswoman. “When it comes to government investigations, it’s our policy to cooperate with all valid searches and requests for data.
