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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

#71

Post by cyounkins »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #41
baskethead wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this why Ubiquiti quality has fallen over the last ~2 years? I went all-in on Ubiquiti almost 3 years ago and I’ve been less than thrilled with the quality and level of support. This chaos that you say happened seems to line up with what I was seeing as a customer but everyone has been shocked at how UI has dropped in terms of quality.

I used to recommend them. Not anymore. My complete home setup is all their kit (the GUI means that if I kick it, the family can likely sort - it is import). I opened a case that a replacement switch (new model, old is EOL) did not work with one of their POE devices. I know this stuff backwards and forwards. I did my testing and basically sent the case to support with all the details (I know this stuff at the ASIC lev…

Possibly related: Ubiquiti used non-standard 24V POE for some devices. Plugging standard 48V POE into certain old devices could damage them, and 48V devices won't power on with 24V injectors.

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

#72

Post by Hamuko »

trhway wrote: post #22
1cvmask wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>SHARP falsely stated, in part and substance, that someone else must have used his PayPal account to make the purchase. and to me it looks like somebody intentionally left breadcrumb trail leading to the guy. With cloud paying so nice these days nobody is going to risk that way for the paltry $2M (ie. less than 3-4 years earnings in Bay Area for the people like this). It looks like the stock price drop is the real "f…

Are you saying that someone purchased a VPN account using his PayPal account and by sheer coincidence, while that said VPN account was in middle of data exfiltration, his home IP address also connected to said servers with no connection to the exfiltration?

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

#73

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

cyounkins wrote: post #71
myrandomcomment wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to recommend them. Not anymore. My complete home setup is all their kit (the GUI means that if I kick it, the family can likely sort - it is import). I opened a case that a replacement switch (new model, old is EOL) did not work with one of their POE devices. I know this stuff backwards and forwards. I did my testing and basically sent the case to support with all the details (I know this stuff at the ASIC lev…

Possibly related: Ubiquiti used non-standard 24V POE for some devices. Plugging standard 48V POE into certain old devices could damage them, and 48V devices won't power on with 24V injectors.

To be fair, and AFAIK, I understand there was (and still is?) no ISO/IEC/IEEE standard for "dumb" PoE power, only "smart"/"managed" power.

The rest of Ubiquiti's gear does use IEEE 802.x.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

ex_ubiquiti wrote: post #23

Ex-Ubiquiti employee here. Nick Sharp wasn't just a senior software engineer. He was the Cloud Lead and ran the whole cloud team. His LinkedIn profile will confirm it. This is why he had access to everything. Nick had his hands in everything from GitHub to Slack and we could never understand why or how. He rose to power in the company by claiming to find a vulnerability that let him access the CEO's personal system,…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by Hamuko »

kadoban wrote: post #17
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Surfshark VPN advertises "strict no-logs policy", "independently audited" and "obfuscated, RAM-only servers". Of course, advertising is just advertising, reality may be different.

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

#76

Post by _pplp »

LiquidPolymer wrote: post #19

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 wa…

> This man was a senior developer

Dude, let's not be generous. Could he write code? Yes. But this is a guy who wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them.

He wasn't even hired on as a dev, he was hired to be the "Cloud guy", essentially a sysadmin for AWS, and basically spooked the CEO into giving him the keys to the castle.

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

#77

Post by duped »

ivalm wrote: post #66
colechristensen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really about intelligence. When faced correcting a false reality you have created, it can be quite hard to decide to phase change into telling the truth. The lies that come out come from not being prepared and not being a very good liar. For people who lie like this, a good way to think about it is as though it were a disease. Actually intelligent people just don't do things like this, even if they have nefa…

> When faced correcting a false reality you have created, it can be quite hard to decide to phase change into telling the truth. The lies that come out come from not being prepared and not being a very good liar. For people who lie like this, a good way to think about it is as though it were a disease. Or just don’t talk to the police and lawyer up. I agree the best thing is to not do the crime, but if you are a crim…

Even if you're not guilty the intelligent and simple thing is to politely decline to speak to the investigators and consult an attorney.

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

#78

Post by BeefWellington »

sneak wrote: post #61
InTheArena wrote: post #46

I do that that the media that breathlessly amplified this persons attack should learn from it. In particular, As much as I like and appreciate his reporting, Brian Krebs was the key person amplifying this message - which makes him a unwitting accomplice to many billions of dollars of damage to ubiquiti shareholders. Responsible disclosure exists for a reason.

Brian Krebs isn't a good reporter or a good person. He has a history of doxxing people without basis (or for the basis of leaving bad reviews on his books). It disappoints me that he has the audience he does.

This provides an excellent case study as well, as his original post on this doesn't seem to produce any corroboration at all, so the "reporting" boils down to: "I got an e-mail from someone making a bunch of claims, so I'll regurgitate those." Including an update/follow-up that was added later, by the same person.

At best, it's shoddy journalism. He was taken for a ride and should bear some public shame for that.

I doubt he'll get sued for it but a lot of people lost money because of him, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried.

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

#79

Post by xwolfi »

klabb3 wrote: post #38
LiquidPolymer wrote: post #19

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 wa…

> 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. I've been seriously bitten by this, and find it more scary than fascinating. Growing up, I thought people who followed cult leaders and charismatic narcissists were so stupid (still do), it appeared so transparent…

I think the first thing you must learn when trending towards adulthood is that nobody has any clue and we're just marginally fancier than ants in the grand scheme.

Hell I grew up in Normandy and was 16 when some Americans became so mad we refused to follow their war in Iraq they called us ungrateful. Talk about the fall of an idol :D So all that freedom we were supposed to be grateful for was only ever supposed to be used when deciding between buying a coca cola or a pepsi cola, but never for real big boy decision ? Thanks I guess ?

Rules have no intrinsic meaning, authorities are there by luck and circumstances and not their mystical ability to always lead towards the right direction, people try their best and often fail and nobody truly is intelligent in all circumstances.

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

#80

Post by throwuxiytayq »

_pplp wrote: post #76
LiquidPolymer wrote: post #19

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 wa…

> This man was a senior developer Dude, let's not be generous. Could he write code? Yes. But this is a guy who wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them. He wasn't even hired on as a dev, he was hired to be the "Cloud guy", essentially a sysadmin for AWS, and basically spooked the CEO into giving him the keys to the cas…

> wrote everything in Node, but absolutely _refused_ to use any existing libraries except for ones he personally wrote. He didn't "trust" them.

Sounds like the single sensible thing he did. Have you seen the npm ecosystem?

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