Former Ubiquiti dev pleads guilty in data theft and extortion case A former Ubiquiti employee accused of hatching an elaborate plot to first steal data from his employer, extort $2 million from bosses to keep it all under wraps, then later orchestrating a smear campaign against the biz pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges Thursday. Nickolas Sharp, of Portland, Oregon, now faces years in …
... as he didn't hark to the old adage "when in a hole stop digging".
IANAL, but I presume that he finally pleaded guilty so that he "only" faced up to 35 years, instead of consecutive years and years for each of the charges, which would have been "life without parole"? Which it may still be, because if he doesn't get parole, he'll be getting out at 71. 35 years of Club Fed won't leave that much.
Indeed. When the Feds are in your flat taking your toys away, it's a bit late to "go out in a blaze of glory".
When the FBI has a warrant on you, you're goose is a good as cooked. Telling porkies like "someone else bought that VPN subscription" is only believable if that someone else was also buying other stuff and you took action to try to stop it. A "someone" who got access to your PayPal account is not going to stop at buying a VPN sub.
As usual, some dumb fuck thought he was on top of the world and, being the pathetic little slimeball that he appears to be, tried to rake in the cash and get an early retirement.
Well he'll get the retirement, but it'll be without the margharitas or the swimming pool blondes.
And he doesn't deserve them.
Sharp — who was working as a cloud lead...
Such a woolly job title, but I assume an aspect of IT Security is involved. Yet Ubiquiti employed someone in a lead role who, even with insider information, couldn't cover the basics of such a crime. (1. Can't configure a WAN connection to drop, and then only resume when VPN is up; 2. Used own VPN service, traceable, as 3. Paid for VPN service with own account; 4. Connected to VPN with traceable IP address for exfiltration.)
Then he pulls a Ted Bundy and shoves himself in the media limelight. Did Sharp, perchance, represent himself in court?
It's full credit to Ubiquiti that their policy of hiring morons ensures crimes will be answered for. (Do I really need to put a /sarc there? Spose I'd better :)
... not sure how an IP gets transmitted in an internet outage...
I presume the story is that is VPN connection dropped when the net went out and his real IP got transmitted between the net coming back on and the reestablishment of the session.
Absolutely dumb to do it from home in any case...
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