Ex-Ubiquiti worker pleads guilty to data theft, extortion, and smear plot

A
former
software
engineer
at
Ubiquiti
Networks
has

pleaded
guilty
to
stealing
gigabytes
of
data
from
the
firm,
attempting
to
extort
millions
of
dollars,
and
damaging
the
company’s
reputation
in
the
media.

37-year-old
Nickolas
Sharp,
of
Portland,
Oregon,
who
worked
in
Ubiquiti’s
cloud
division,
exploited
his
privileged
access
to
the
company’s
AWS
servers
and
GitHub
repositories
in
order
to
download
gigabytes
of
confidential
information.

Thinking
he
had
covered
his
tracks
by
using
a
SurfShark
VPN
account
to
hide
his
home
IP
address
while
exfiltrating
data
in
the
dead
of
the
night,
a
temporary
outage
caused
his
real
IP
address
to
be
logged.

As
we

previously
reported,
Sharp
then
posed
as
an
anonymous
hacker,
demanding
US
$2
million
for
the
data’s
safe
return
and
details
of
the
vulnerability
he
claimed
to
have
exploited.

When
Ubiquiti
refused
to
pay
the
ransom,
 Sharp
published
some
of
the
stolen
files
online.

Sharp’s
home
was
searched
by
the
FBI,
and
he
told
the
authorities
that
someone
else
must
have
used
his
PayPal
account
to
purchase
the
SurfShark
VPN
account.

Several
days
after
being
questioned
by
the
FBI,
Sharp
made
the
extraordinary
decision
to
contact
technology
journalists
pretending
to
be
a
whistleblower
within
the
company.
 The
resulting
media
stories
of
security
issues
at
Ubiquiti
caused
the
business’s
share
price
to
fall
20%
–
a
loss
in
market
capitalisation
of
over
US
$4
billion.

Sharp,
has
now
pled
guilty
to
charges
of
wire
fraud,
making
false
statements
to
the
FBI,
and
transmitting
a
program
to
a
protected
computer
that
intentionally
caused
damage.
 He
faces
a
total
maximum
of
35
years
in
prison,
and
is
scheduled
to
be
sentenced
on
May
10,
2023.

Graham
Cluley
is
an
award-winning
security
blogger,
researcher
and
public
speaker.
He
has
been
working
in
the
computer
security
industry
since
the
early
1990s.

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