Extortion Attempt by Former Ubiquiti Developer

Former Ubiquiti employee Nickolas Sharp admitted to the company that he stole gigabytes of private data from the company’s network while he was overseeing the company’s cloud technology team. During this period, he misrepresented himself as an anonymous hacker and whistleblower to avoid detection. Ubiquiti’s GitHub repositories and AWS servers were breached in December 2020 by Sharp, a 36-year-old software engineer from Portland, Oregon. 

Sharp agreed that he would plead guilty to three charges, including making false statements to the FBI, wire fraud, and sending a malicious computer program to a protected computer. Those who commit either of these offenses will be punished with a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison as punishment. 

As a consequence of the data theft incident reported by Ubiquiti in January 2021, the company reported a security incident. 

Using the cover of being an anonymous hacker and pretending to target the company, Sharp tried to extort them. There were 50 bitcoins demanded in the ransom note, which was approximately equal to about $1.9 million at the time the note was written. It was a condition of the agreement to recover the data in exchange for disclosing the weakness in the network that allowed the hack to take place. While Ubiquiti could have paid the ransom by paying the ransom, it chose to change every employee’s login information rather than pa

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.