The former security director of Uber Joseph Sullivan has been charged with halting a taxi app hack in 2016, exposing the personal details of 57 million customers and drivers.
Rather than report the hack to the authorities, Sullivan decided to keep it quiet and buy off the hackers.
According to the prosecutor, Sullivan should have gone to market watchdog FTC, which was investigating another hack at Uber from 2014 at the time.
Instead, he paid the hackers $ 100,000 in bitcoins. He used a program for this in which Uber rewards reporting vulnerabilities found in its computer code.
Sullivan is charged with the hindrance of justice and failure to report a crime.
However, according to the former Uber director, the case is misplaced. A spokesman for Sullivan said that at Uber, a large team of some of the best computer experts investigated the hack and that without Sullivan and that team, the two perpetrators would never have been caught.
Besides, Uber’s legal department was responsible for reporting the hack, according to Sullivan.
The two hackers pleaded guilty to computer fraud last year.