A former software program engineer at Ubiquiti Networks has pleaded responsible to stealing gigabytes of information from the agency, making an attempt to extort thousands and thousands of {dollars}, and damaging the corporate’s status within the media.
37-year-old Nickolas Sharp, of Portland, Oregon, who labored in Ubiquiti’s cloud division, exploited his privileged entry to the corporate’s AWS servers and GitHub repositories so as to obtain gigabytes of confidential info.
Considering he had coated his tracks by utilizing a SurfShark VPN account to cover his residence IP handle whereas exfiltrating knowledge within the useless of the night time, a brief outage brought about his actual IP handle to be logged.
As we beforehand reported, Sharp then posed as an nameless hacker, demanding US $2 million for the information’s secure return and particulars of the vulnerability he claimed to have exploited.
When Ubiquiti refused to pay the ransom, Â Sharp printed a number of the stolen recordsdata on-line.
Sharp’s residence was searched by the FBI, and he instructed the authorities that another person will need to have used his PayPal account to buy the SurfShark VPN account.
A number of days after being questioned by the FBI, Sharp made the extraordinary choice to contact know-how journalists pretending to be a whistleblower inside the firm. Â The ensuing media tales of safety points at Ubiquiti brought about the enterprise’s share worth to fall 20% – a loss in market capitalisation of over US $4 billion.
Sharp, has now pled responsible to costs of wire fraud, making false statements to the FBI, and transmitting a program to a protected pc that deliberately brought about injury. Â He faces a complete most of 35 years in jail, and is scheduled to be sentenced on Might 10, 2023.
