Former Ubiquity employee declared He pleaded guilty to trying to steal about $2 million worth of cryptocurrency while pretending to be an anonymous hacker and whistleblower while working for a company and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Suspect Nicholas Sharpe, 37, used insider access as a senior developer to steal sensitive data and pay a network technology provider 50 bitcoins (approximately $2 million at the time) in exchange for the siphoned data. Arrested in December 2021 for sending anonymous emails asking to information.
However, Ubiquiti did not yield to the ransom demands, called law enforcement, and eventually tracked a VPN connection to a Surfshark account that Sharp had purchased with a PayPal account, identifying the hacker.
The U.S. Department of Justice said that “Sharp repeatedly abused administrative access to download several gigabytes of sensitive data from his employer,” adding that it “renamed the session file to make it appear as if another colleague had accessed his malicious session.” made it look like he was involved in the
The Oregon-based defendant made false statements denying knowledge of the extortion plot, and falsified log retention policies and other session filenames to hide fraudulent activity on the company’s network.
Sharp, who worked at Ubiquity from August 2018 to late March 2021, plead guilty Earlier this year in February, it mistakenly spread the news that the company had been hacked by an unidentified perpetrator who gained administrative access to the company’s AWS account.
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A hoaxed security breach caused Ubiquiti’s stock price to drop about 20% in March 2021, wiping out its market capitalization by more than $4 billion.
In addition to a prison sentence, Sharpe was “sentenced to three years of supervised release and required to pay $1,590,487 in damages and forfeiture of personal property used or to be used in connection with these crimes.” commanded.”
