The U.S. District Court in San Francisco charged the former head of Uber’s security team, Joseph Sullivan, with concealing a hack that exposed data of 57 million drivers and riders for the company. The information comes from Bloomberg.
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The hacking attack occurred in October 2016. The attackers gained access to the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million passengers and about 7 million drivers.
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However the company did not report the incident to authorities. According to investigators, instead Sullivan paid the hackers $100,000 in bitcoins and agreed with them to keep quiet.
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The payment to the hackers came under Uber’s Bug Bounty program.
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The incident came to light a year later — after Sullivan’s dismissal and a leadership change at Uber.
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Subsequently, the hackers were arrested and pleaded guilty. Prosecutors noted that the hackers targeted other tech companies after the Uber incident.
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A spokesman for Sullivan said that "without the latter’s efforts, those responsible for the incident would probably never have been identified." He added that Sullivan acted with the approval of Uber’s legal department and the charges against him are unfounded.
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Law enforcement authorities insist that Sullivan’s actions amount to obstructing justice and concealing a crime.
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If found guilty, Sullivan faces up to eight years in prison.
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In late July, hackers attacked Canon’s cloud servers and extorted cryptocurrency under the threat of releasing user data.
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