An attempt by a former Uber chief security officer to dismiss wire fraud charges against him have been thrown out by a US judge.

Joe Sullivan, who worked at Uber from 2015 until 2017, is facing criminal charges over claims that he tried to cover up a cyber-attack and data breach at the ride-sharing company. He had previously attempted to have the wire fraud charges against him dismissed.

Charges were first brought against Sullivan in 2020 over claims that the company attempted to cover up a highly damaging 2016 data breach.

This saw personal data belonging to around 57 million customers and employees exposed. This included licence numbers for 600,000 drivers.

However, the company did not disclose the breach until November 2017, shortly after the company’s current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, took over.

Sullivan was charged by the US Department of Justice with felony obstruction of justice over allegations that he deliberately concealed details of the hack from federal investigators.

He was also accused of agreeing to pay the hackers using $100,000 in Bitcoin, with the funds taken from the company’s bug bounty programme.

In addition, allegations claim that the hackers had to sign a non-disclosure agreement claiming they had failed to access or steal company data.

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The wire fraud charges were added in December 2021 to the case against the former Uber officer as part of a superseding indictment.

In the latest ruling, the judge rejected Sullivan’s claim that prosecutors failed to show that the reason for the attempted cover up was keeping the company’s drivers on its platform so they could continue paying service fees.

In addition, US District Judge William Orrick also rejected Sullivan’s claim that he was not attempting to deceive Uber’s drivers, but only conceal the hack from then-CEO Travis Kalanick and Uber’s general counsel.

“Although the superseding indictment does not state that Sullivan made any misrepresentations directly to those drivers, it does allege that misrepresentations made to others were part of his scheme to defraud them. That is enough for the wire fraud counts to proceed,” the court order states.

As part of the breach, Uber paid $148 million to settle claims lodged by all 50 states and Washington DC in September 2018.

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