Former Uber Security Chief Convicted

With organised ransomware gangs, government-backed hacking teams and anarchist kids targeting companies, being a chief information security officer is already a daunting job.

The verdict ended a dramatic case that pitted Joe Sullivan, a prominent security expert who was an early prosecutor of cyber crimes for the San Francisco US attorney’s office, against his former government office.

In between prosecuting hackers and being prosecuted, Sullivan served as the top security executive at Facebook, Uber and Cloudflare.

Now, a jury in San Francisco found Joe Sullivan, who was fired from Uber in 2017, guilty of obstruction of justice and concealing a felony.

At the time, prosecutors alleged he arranged to pay the hackers $100,000 (£87,964) in bitcoin and had them sign nondisclosure agreements that falsely stated they had not stolen data. Increasingly, companies negotiate with ransomware hackers. But investigators said they must "do the right thing" when their systems are breached.

The conviction is a dramatic reversal for Sullivan, who had at one point in his career prosecuted cyber-related crime for the San Francisco US attorney's office.

After Sullivan's conviction his lawyer, David Angeli, said "Mr Sullivan's sole focus, in this incident and throughout his distinguished career, has been ensuring the safety of people's personal data on the internet," said The Washington Post.

But prosecutors said the case was a warning to companies. “Technology companies in the Northern District of California collect and store vast amounts of data from users... We expect those companies to protect that data and to alert customers and appropriate authorities when such data is stolen by hackers," the US attorney Stephanie  Hinds said. 

Ms. Hinds accused Sullivan of working to hide the data breach from US regulator the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), adding he "took steps to prevent the hackers from being caught".

At the time, the FTC was already investigating Uber following a 2014 hack. When it was hacked again, the attackers emailed Sullivan and told him they had stolen a large amount of data, which they would delete in return for a ransom, according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) .

Staff working for Sullivan confirmed that data, including about 57 million Uber users' records and 600,000 driving-licence numbers, had been stolen.

According to the US Dept of Justive (DOJ) Sullivan arranged for the hackers to be paid in bitcoin in exchange for them signing non-disclosure agreements to not reveal the hack to anyone. The hackers were paid in December 2016, even though they had refused to provide their true names. The payment was disguised as a "bug bounty", a reward used to pay cyber-security researchers who disclose vulnerabilities so they can be fixed.

The Washington Post reported that the process enabled Uber to gather clues about the two hackers. The firm eventually identified the pair - both of whom have since been convicted of criminal offences - in January 2017 and required them to sign new agreements in their own names. The two cyber criminals were Brandon Charles Glover and Vasile Mereacre who pleaded guilty in 2019.

Sullivan, who now serves as Cloudflare’s CSO, told a subordinate that information about the breach needed to be “tightly controlled” and that the story outside of the security group was to be that “this investigation does not exist.”

BBC:     Washington Post:     DOJ:     Computing:     Guardian:     Register:    Techcrunch:

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