A former Ubiquiti employee has been sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to trying to steal nearly $2 million worth of cryptocurrency while on the job while pretending to be an anonymous hacker and whistleblower.
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 scheme, and falsified log retention policies and other session filenames to conceal fraudulent activity on the company’s network.
Sharp, who worked for Ubiquiti from August 2018 to late March 2021, accidentally spread the news that the company was hacked by an unidentified perpetrator who gained administrator access to the company’s AWS account. He pleaded guilty in early February this year.
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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.”
