The newspaper writes that former Uber head of security Joe Sullivan avoided an actual jail sentence for covering up a serious user data security breach. The Wall Street Gazette. The top executive of the tech company hid that hackers stole the data of more than 57 million users and drivers of the service.
Federal Judge William Orrick announced that Sullivan would not be sentenced to prison — instead, he received three years’ probation and must complete 200 hours of community service.
According to the WSJ, the court motivated its decision against Sullivan by the unusual nature of the case and the fact that such an investigation was the first of its kind.
The judge also pointed to numerous letters in which the former head of safety at Uber was positively characterized. One of these letters was signed by 40 former or current security chiefs of companies.
Event dead in October 2016. Joe Sullivan and one of his associates were fired from the company because, to their knowledge, the data leak had been hidden for more than a year.
With versions of the investigationAs Sullivan himself attests, he and his former Uber colleagues paid the hackers nearly $100,000 to keep the hack a secret. The ransom was transferred in bitcoin and given as a transfer to “white hackers” to find bugs in the service system.
Sullivan’s lawyers argued in court that the expert forced the hackers to sign a confidentiality agreement that required all data obtained as a result of the Uber attack to be destroyed. The WSJ concluded that there is still no confirmation that the hackers met this condition.