A Ubiquiti developer has been charged with stealing data from the company and extortion attempts totalling $2m in what prosecutors claim was a vicious campaign to harm the firm's share price – including allegedly planting fake press stories about the breaches.
US federal prosecutors claimed that 36-year-old Nickolas Sharp had used his "access as a trusted insider" to steal data from his employer's AWS and GitHub instances before "posing as an anonymous hacker" to send a ransom demand of 50 Bitcoins.
The DoJ statement does not mention Sharp's employer by name, but a Linkedin account in Sharp's name says he worked for Ubiquiti as a cloud lead between August 2018 and March 2021, having previously worked for Amazon as a software development engineer.
In an eyebrow-raising indictment [PDF, 19 pages, non-searchable] prosecutors claim Sharp not only pwned his employer's business from the inside but joined internal damage control efforts, and allegedly posed as a concerned whistleblower to make false claims about the company wrongly downplaying the attack's severity, wiping $4bn off its market capitalisation.
Criminal charges were filed overnight in an American federal court against Sharp, of Portland, Oregon. The indictment valued the 50 Bitcoins at $1.9m "based on the prevailing exchange rate at the time."
US attorney Damian Williams said in a US Justice Department statement: "As further alleged, after the FBI searched his home in connection with the theft, Sharp, now posing as...
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