Former Ubiquiti Employee Gets 6 Years in Jail for $2 Million Crypto Extortion Case

A former employee of Ubiquiti has been sentenced to six years in jail soon after he pleaded guilty to posing as an anonymous hacker and a whistleblower in an attempt to extort just about $2 million truly worth of cryptocurrency though working at the organization.

Nickolas Sharp, 37, was arrested in December 2021 for working with his insider accessibility as a senior developer to steal private data and sending an anonymous email asking the network technology service provider to pay 50 bitcoin (about $2 million at the time) in exchange for the siphoned information and facts.

Ubiquiti, having said that, did not produce to the ransom try and as an alternative looped in law enforcement, which inevitably recognized Sharp as the hacker following tracing a VPN connection to a Surfshark account purchased with his PayPal account.

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“Sharp repeatedly misused his administrative access to download gigabytes of private information from his employer,” the U.S. Justice Section said, incorporating he “modified session file names to try to make it show up as if other coworkers have been responsible for his destructive periods.”

The Oregon-dependent defendant, in addition to supplying bogus statements denying any know-how of the extortion plan, tampered with log retention policies and other session file names in purchase to conceal his unauthorized action on the company’s network.

Sharp, who was utilized at Ubiquiti from August 2018 via late March 2021, pleaded guilty earlier this February to falsely spreading the news that the firm experienced been hacked by an unknown perpetrator who had acquired administrator entry to the firm’s AWS accounts.

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The fabricated security breach led to Ubiquiti’s stock value sliding somewhere around 20% in March 2021, triggering it to get rid of above $4 billion in current market capitalization.

In addition to the prison expression, Sharp has been “sentenced to 3 decades of supervised launch and requested to pay restitution of $1,590,487 and to forfeit own home used or meant to be employed in link with these offenses.”

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