Presented at
DEF CON 31 (2023),
Aug. 11, 2023, 10 a.m.
(45 minutes)
The federal criminal case of United States v. Joseph Sullivan, NDCA 3-20-CR-337 WHO, has been covered and debated quite publicly since I was fired by the new Uber CEO in November 2017, a year after the incident. Most discussion has focused on questions of my guilt or innocence, the culpability of other executives at the company, and the implications of the case for other security executives.
Less has been written about the guilt or innocence of those who accessed Uber’s AWS environment in October 2016 and triggered an incident response by emailing me and asking for payment. After we met them, my team and I did not consider those 19- and 20-year-old kids to be criminal actors and treated them as security researchers. Yet both also faced federal criminal charges.
During my talk I will review the extraordinary investigation done by my team at Uber and put it into the context of other historical cases we and I had worked on. Whether or not you consider them to be security researchers, there are many lessons to be learned related to the dynamics between researchers and companies and the dynamics between companies and the government.
Presenters:
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Joe Sullivan
Joe Sullivan is the CEO of Ukraine Friends, a nonprofit providing humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine. He also advises a number of startups and mentors security leaders. Joe has worked at the intersection of government, technology, and security since the mid-1990s. He spent 8 years working for the US DOJ, eventually as a federal prosecutor 100% focused on technology-related crimes, received national recognition from the DOJ for outstanding service as a federal prosecutor, and worked on many first-of-their-kind cybercrime cases, including supporting the digital aspects of the 9/11 investigation. Joe was recruited to eBay in 2002 to build out their eCrime team, and later took on responsibilities at PayPal. In 2008 Joe moved to Facebook where he became their CSO, building a small security org into a team of hundreds. He was recruited from there to join Uber in 2015 to be their first CSO. After Uber, Joe spent 2018 through 2022 as the CSO at Cloudflare. He has also advised a significant number of companies over the years, including AirBnB and DoorDash. Joe has testified as an expert before the US Congress twice, been a commissioner on the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, a board member on the National Cyber Security Alliance, a many-time opening plenary speaker at the Dallas Crimes Against Children Conference, a participant in a White House anti-online-bullying effort, an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, and in 2016 accepted an appointment from President Obama to his Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.
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