Uber ex-security boss accused of covering up hack attack

I found a very interesting article on the former chief security officer of Uber, Joseph Sullivan. Sullivan is currently being charged with obstruction of justice for an incident that happened at Uber in 2016. At that time, the company had the details of 57 million uber drivers and passengers exposed by a hacking group. To keep this quiet, Sullivan tried to cover up the data breach by paying the hackers 100,000 dollars to delete all the data they had stolen. When the data breach was revealed to the public in 2017, Uber fired Sullivan. Now he is being charged with obstruction of justice because he took “deliberate steps” to stop the FTC from finding out about the hackings.

He disguised the payments by using bitcoin instead of actual money and called it a “bug bounty” reward which is usually given to cyber security experts for discovering vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed. On top of this, he had the hackers sign a non disclosure agreement as part of the payment that stated that they had not stolen any data from Uber. Because of his actions, Uber had to pay $148 million dollars in legal claims from all 50 States.

 

Tidy, Joe. “Uber Ex-Security Boss Accused of Covering up Hack Attack.” BBC News, BBC, 21 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/technology-53861375?intlink_from_url=www.bbc.com/news/topics/c347w30eq7xt/computer-hacking.