A former employee of the technology company Ubiquiti, Nickolas Sharp, pleaded guilty on Thursday in a Manhattan federal courtroom on charges related to perpetrating an audacious insider attack on his employer. Sharp, 37, was a senior software engineer at the New York-based company, which specializes in wireless communications. He abused his administrative access and downloaded gigabytes of confidential data from the company's Amazon Web Services and GitHub servers. He then demanded a ransom of about $1.9 million in bitcoin in exchange for the stolen files and information about a purported insecure Backdoor in the system. Sharp pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting a program to a protected computer that intentionally caused damage; one count of wire fraud; and one count of making false statements to the FBI. Together, the charges carry a maximum sentence of 35 years, which will be decided by a judge in May. After the company discovered the breach, Sharp was assigned to the team working to investigate and remediate the incident. He then posed as an anonymous hacker and sent a ransom note. When his demands were not met, he retaliated by causing false news stories to be published about the company. Following the coverage, Ubiquiti's stock plummeted, losing $4 billion in market capitalization over a two-day span. The journalist Brian Krebs, who quoted Sharp anonymously on his site Krebs on Security, was ultimately sued by Ubiquiti for his coverage.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Thu, 02 Feb 2023 21:04:02 +0000