New age car service Uber on Thursday said that it has hired former Facebook security chief Joe Sullivan as its first ever Chief Security Officer.
Sullivan, who will take the position as CSO at Uber in late April, joins the company after 5 years at Facebook in a similar role, and nearly 7 years at eBay and PayPal prior to that.
Sullivan also spent 8 years with the Department of Justice prosecuting cybercrime.
“I look forward to bringing the best practices that I’ve learned along the way to Uber and doing defining work in bridging the divide between the digital and physical worlds,” Sullivan said in a statement. “There’s a great foundation of safety already in place; my goal is to make it even stronger.”
“This is a chance to help build the culture of a young and growing organization, and to continue building upon the safety and security initiatives that are the backbone of Uber’s success,” Sullivan continued.
The appointment of Sullivan as CSO comes just weeks after the company disclosed that a data breach may have allowed malicious actors to gain access to the driver’s license numbers of roughly 50,000 of its drivers. On Feb. 27, Uber said that it had identified a “one-time access of an Uber database” by an unauthorized third party in May 2014.
Sullivan is a graduate of Providence College and holds a J.D. in Law from the University of Miami School of Law.
According to Sullivan’s LinkedIn profile, he also is a Trust and Safety Advisory Board member at AirBnB.
“In searching for a thought leader to help Uber redefine safety and data security, we couldn’t ask for someone better than Joe Sullivan,” Uber’s Travis Kalanick wrote in a blog post.

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.
More from Mike Lennon
- ‘No Evidence’ of Cyberattack Related to FAA Outage, White House Says
- SecurityWeek to Host 2022 ICS Cybersecurity Conference October 24-27 in Atlanta
- Google Completes $5.4 Billion Acquisition of Mandiant
- Cybersecurity Firm ZeroFox Begins Trading on Nasdaq via SPAC Deal
- HUMAN Security and PerimeterX Merge on Mission to Combat Bots
- Last Call: CFP for ICS Cybersecurity Conference Closes July 15th
- Johnson Controls Acquires Tempered Networks to Shield Buildings From Cyberattacks
- Snowflake Launches Cybersecurity Workload to Find Threats Across Massive Data Sets
Latest News
- Fraudulent “CryptoRom” Apps Slip Through Apple and Google App Store Review Process
- US Downs Chinese Balloon Off Carolina Coast
- Microsoft: Iran Unit Behind Charlie Hebdo Hack-and-Leak Op
- Feds Say Cyberattack Caused Suicide Helpline’s Outage
- Big China Spy Balloon Moving East Over US, Pentagon Says
- Former Ubiquiti Employee Who Posed as Hacker Pleads Guilty
- Cyber Insights 2023: Venture Capital
- Atlassian Warns of Critical Jira Service Management Vulnerability
