Joe Sullivan, the former chief security officer for Uber, was convicted Wednesday of paying hackers $100,000 after they breached the ride-sharing company in 2016 as if it was a bug bounty rather than an extortion demand.
According to media reports, Sullivan, who prior to Uber served as Facebook's first CSO and currently serves as the top security official at Cloudflare, was found guilty of obstructing justice for keeping the breach from the Federal Trade Commission and actively hiding a felony.
The hackers stole the personal information of nearly 60 million Uber drivers and customers in 2016, but Sullivan was accused of disguising the nature of the payment to conceal the breach from authorities and Uber management when a new CEO took over in 2017, SC Media previously reported.
Uber paid $148 million in 2018 to settle the cover-up claims, but the fed’s case against Sullivan went forward.
A date has not been set for sentencing in the case.
