Former Uber chief security officer Joe Sullivan is set to face wire fraud charges in the US for his alleged attempt to cover-up an October 2016 Uber data breach that saw 57m user and driver records compromised by hackers.

A federal judge made the announcement at a ruling yesterday (28 June) as part of an ongoing case against Sullivan for his “attempt to defraud Uber’s drivers by failing to disclose the 2016 breach”. The former Uber CSO was first charged in August 2020 and indicted the following month.

The court said that Sullivan was serving as Uber’s chief security officer when hackers revealed to him that they had accessed and downloaded an Uber database containing personally identifying information, or PII, including approximately 600,000 driver’s license numbers.

Details of the Uber hack and corporate cover-up first emerged in late 2017, when Sullivan was fired by Uber for his role.

The court described how Sullivan allegedly orchestrated the disbursement of a six-figure payment to two hackers in exchange for their silence about the hack. The indictment further alleges that he took “deliberate steps” to prevent news of the hack from being made public.

“Sullivan took deliberate steps to prevent persons whose PII was stolen from discovering that the hack had occurred and took steps to conceal, deflect, and mislead the US Federal Trade Commission about the data breach,” the court wrote.

According to Reuters, US district judge William Orrick rejected Sullivan’s claim that prosecutors did not adequately allege he concealed the hacking to ensure that Uber drivers would not flee and would continue paying service fees.

He also rejected Sullivan’s claim that those allegedly deceived were Uber’s then-chief executive, Travis Kalanick, and its general counsel – not Uber drivers. The case is likely the first instance of a corporate security chief being criminally charged for covering-up a hacking.

“When a company like Uber gets hacked, we expect good corporate citizenship, we expect disclosure to the employee and consumer victims in that hack,” US attorney David Anderson said in August 2020. “In this case, what we saw was the exact opposite of good corporate behaviour.”

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