A former Ubiquiti employee posed as an anonymous hacker while working for the company and tried to extort $2 million in crypto assets.
Nickolas Sharp was arrested in December 2021 and sentenced to six years in prison at the conclusion of the investigation.
According to investigators, Mr. Sharp, as a senior developer, used official access to steal confidential company data.
Then, under the guise of an anonymous hacker, the employee sent a letter to the company demanding to pay 50 bitcoins (about $2 million at the time) in exchange for the return of the stolen data.
Information about an alleged hack of Ubiquiti servers and an intruder who gained administrator access to AWS accounts hit the web.
This caused Ubiquiti’s stock price to drop about 20% in March 2021. After that, the market capitalization of the company fell by almost $4 billion.
Ubiquiti’s administration did not give in to the “hacker,” contacting law enforcement and network security experts instead.
Together, they identified Nicholas Sharp as a hacker after tracking the network activity of a VPN connection to a Surfshark account owned by Sharp and purchased with his PayPal account.
Earlier, Venezuela’s largest bank, Banco de Venezuela, was the victim of a cryptocurrency ransomware attack that extorted a ransom in cryptocurrency to decrypt and restore access to data.