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Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

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Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#11

Post by seibelj »

jimsparkman wrote: post #2

Wow, quite brazen. What an interesting read. Couple things that stood out to me was that the incident occurs in December and the raid ensues March 24th, so roughly 3 months. Building the case I presume. Then after the raid, the accused doubles down and seeds fake news stories.

I'm a big fan of a show called "Forensic Files", which is like a real-life CSI where each episode is a documentary and only takes 20 minutes (I highly recommend).

In addition to the the usual passion killings and random murders, there is the occasional criminal that thinks they are way smarter than everyone else and doubles or triples down even as the noose is tightening, because they 100% believe they are geniuses and will get away with it.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVVL_U4BTGs

In this episode a member of Mensa, who enjoyed staging murder mystery dinner parties for his Mensa friends, poisoned his neighbor over loud music and barking dogs, and thought he was such a criminal mastermind that he could talk his way out of it. These people have mental disorders.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#12

Post by rmahan »

phnofive wrote: post #8

> At one point during the exfiltration of Company-1 data, SHARP’s home IP address became unmasked following a temporary internet outage at SHARP’s home. This seems to explain how this comes down after less than a year since the incident. Surfshark now supports an outage related kill switch, not sure if that's a new feature.

Seems like he probably would have been caught either way, but would have costed and taken longer if he didn’t drop his VPN. Being one person in a closed room of people knowing about the ransom, and using PayPal over crypto to pay for a VPN seems like it would leave a trail. Eventually would’ve narrowed it down, hopefully.

Edit: oh, and using his own keys that were tied to him as an employee while he was being the attacker.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#13

Post by mjamil »

Mr. Sharp is apparently not so sharp. He carried out the attack from his home network. He connected directly for enough time that his bare IP was logged. The rest of the time, he carried out the attack using a commercially purchased VPN solution that was trivial to trace back to him via the purchase record. He lied to the FBI. (I have yet to understand why people talk to law enforcement instead of staying silent so as to not implicate themselves.) And, for no apparently good reason (meaning, there's no claim of him shorting the stock), after the raid, he seeded fake news that drove the company's stock down 20%.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#14

Post by eganist »

Tangential: there's a James Margolin listed as one of the contacts, and he looks vaguely like he could be a parent or uncle of one Grant Margolin, and they're both roughly local to NYC-ish based on James' LinkedIn. I wonder if there's any relation.

Grant Margolin being one of the co-conspirators behind Fyre fest, along with Billy McFarland. I had the dubious privilege of interacting with the two in DC alongside Ja Rule as part of a Magnises event.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#15

Post by jimsparkman »

seibelj wrote: post #11
jimsparkman wrote: post #2

Wow, quite brazen. What an interesting read. Couple things that stood out to me was that the incident occurs in December and the raid ensues March 24th, so roughly 3 months. Building the case I presume. Then after the raid, the accused doubles down and seeds fake news stories.

I'm a big fan of a show called "Forensic Files", which is like a real-life CSI where each episode is a documentary and only takes 20 minutes (I highly recommend). In addition to the the usual passion killings and random murders, there is the occasional criminal that thinks they are way smarter than everyone else and doubles or triples down even as the noose is tightening, because they 100% believe they are geniuses a…

Thanks for the recommendation! Now that you mention it, I’ve seen similar behavior on Dateline. Wonder if there are other terms for essentially “digging the hole deeper.”

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#17

Post by kadoban »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5
jimsparkman wrote: post #2

Wow, quite brazen. What an interesting read. Couple things that stood out to me was that the incident occurs in December and the raid ensues March 24th, so roughly 3 months. Building the case I presume. Then after the raid, the accused doubles down and seeds fake news stories.

It sounds like he got caught because his VPN dropped during some sort of outage. It's funny because I feel like "don't do crime from your home network" should be an incredibly obvious concept.

I can't imagine just using some random VPN is really going to help much anyway. When the cops come knocking they're just going to give you up right?

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#18

Post by 1cvmask »

mjamil wrote: post #13

Mr. Sharp is apparently not so sharp. He carried out the attack from his home network. He connected directly for enough time that his bare IP was logged. The rest of the time, he carried out the attack using a commercially purchased VPN solution that was trivial to trace back to him via the purchase record. He lied to the FBI. (I have yet to understand why people talk to law enforcement instead of staying silent so a…

Guess he should have bought a VPN with cash or stole someone else’s if Mr. Sharp wanted to be more sharp about it.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#19

Post by LiquidPolymer »

I've always been fascinated by the idea that intelligence lies within a spectrum. Someone might be incredibly smart about a narrow topic or field, yet be blind to their own stupidity within another realm.

To me, this seems like a classic example. To quote the press release: "During the execution of that search, SHARP made numerous false statements to FBI agents, including, among other things, in substance, that he was not the perpetrator of the Incident and that he had not used Surfshark VPN prior to the discovery of the Incident. When confronted with records demonstrating that SHARP purchased the Surfshark VPN service in July 2020, approximately six months prior to the Incident, SHARP falsely stated, in part and substance, that someone else must have used his PayPal account to make the purchase."

This man was a senior developer yet this quote sounds like it comes from a nine year-old. Not to mention "hire a lawyer, don't talk to the police" has always been pretty solid advice.

He now faces significant prison time, and the strong potential for a dismal life.

Re: Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company

#20

Post by bithavoc »

A quick search revealed a LinkedIn profile[0] of a previous Ubiquiti employee, he seemed to have left the company in March 2021. I wonder what was first, he quitting his job at Ubiquiti or the FBI Raid.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickolassharp

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