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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

#81

Post by throwaway-swsh »

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,…

If it makes you feel any better I worked with him at Nike in 2014 and he was a complete jerk then too. I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner if anything. How do these people stay employed?

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

#82

Post by fencepost »

The things that really jumped at me looking at his LinkedIn profile were 1) job hopper and 2) lots of overlapping - perhaps it was all part time gigs but some of the overlap surprised me. I was shocked at the number of sub-year positions.

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

#83

Post by 1991g »

bithavoc wrote: post #20

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

Somewhat amusing that he has a new dev job since the incident.

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

#84

Post by chaostheory »

baskethead wrote: post #27
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,…

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.

If you read their Glassdoor reviews, one of the common complaints was the company’s hostility towards automated tests.

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

#85

Post by DangitBobby »

Hamuko wrote: post #72
trhway wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I mean... That is what someone who's setting up a patsy would do if they could. Home networks are not exactly Fort Knox, are they? I had a bunch of rogue connections banging around trying to brute-force database logins within my home LAN earlier this year. I imagine they could have made a connection to a server look like it originated from within my LAN, and if I wasn't watching a live feed of my database connection logs at the time I never would have noticed.

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

#86

Post by nathanvanfleet »

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…

That's not a quote it's a summary of what he said

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

#88

Post by CyanLite2 »

dotBen wrote: post #31
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…

(I have yet to understand why people talk to law enforcement instead of staying silent so as to not implicate themselves.) When the FBI knock at the door you totally do the whole "no comment/talk to my lawyer" thing. But what happens next if you're actually part of an investigation is they hand you a grand jury subpoena (which they were going to do anyway, even if you just talked willingly, because they have already…

Police often give the line, "It'll go better for you if you just tell me the truth now" or "You'll get a better deal if we don't get lawyers involved". This often spooks people into cooperating without lawyers and they end up taking the first deal they get. I'd like see some real legal experts weigh in on the legality of these pre-lawyer offers.

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

#89

Post by astrange »

fastball wrote: post #69
maccolgan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market cap is monopoly money, it doesn't mean anything.

Alas not true. The higher your market cap, the more money you can raise by printing more stocks.

Theoretically it would go down if you did that. In practice it seems to go up if people like you.

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

#90

Post by kabes »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #80
_pplp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Are node apps getting way more hacked than say php or java servers? Was his code any better?
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