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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

#161
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Paypal, and apparently this guy's email server, don't have a no-receipts policy though.

some services drop your payment information after something like 45 days, -supposedly-. Who knows if they actually do.

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

#162
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for how one might maintain composure enough to handle these situations if they ever find themselves in them? I imagine the obvious answer is just practice saying "no comment, I need my lawyer present" but I'm not convinced this would make one immune to their Jedi mind tricks when the day comes to exercise it

I have a silly idea. Say the truth, admit you made a lapse of judgment, offer to repair your victims. Silly I know, but maybe you d be surprised this would go a long way in getting out of this shit situation eventually instead of turning everyone into predatory "we ll crush him for eternity" mode ?

I think it’s useful to know how to handle yourself when being interrogated and also innocent. I don’t think the op was asking how if they are guilty.

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

#163
post #113
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Reminded me of this I read recently and found quite fascinating — http://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/

Fascinating, and indeed related. One of the most interesting tactics was people who admit they're wrong or otherwise signal that they're willing to change their view, but they're really not. That's an excellent example of a blind spot in my manipulator radar.

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

#164
post #30

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 yet this quote sounds like it comes from a nine year-old. Tech has a contempt culture problem, and this can be one manifestation of it: feeling that being moderately bright about getting computers to do things makes you a tremendous intellect, and everyone else around you an easily hoodwinked moron. Perhaps the most extreme example was Hans Reiser. Anyone who followed the twists and…

A lot of the tech community have pretty hostile attitudes in general for reasons I can only wildly conjecture, but the question I also would pose is if the distribution is all that different from the rest of the population. Look at the doctors and lawyers we’ve been seeing that are at least in public saying some of the most ridiculous things imaginable oftentimes even without an obvious financial motive involved like in most cases I’ve heard with engineers being deceitful.

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

#165
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use node, if it wasn’t for the vast package exosystem?

Path of least resistance? Picking a language (and possibly runtime) is a pretty huge investment if you intend to become proficient. A lot of people like to think that they are polyglot programmers and that language doesn't really matter. But it does. It takes a few years to become a decent programmer in a given language. And if people claim it takes just weeks or a couple of months, it really only tells you that they…

It takes years to become acquianted with the library ecosystem of a given language. If you're going to write everything from scratch (especially in a language with an extremely bare-bones standard library), it takes maybe months to become proficient with any language in a paradigm you already know, save a few extremes (C++).

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

#166
post #94

He could've prevent all of this by a) making sure his traffic was blackholed when the VPN went down and b) adding another layer from a free service (like TOR or a proxy or another VPN). He also should've been actively using the VPN so his traffic patterns wouldn't stand out as much, and so his purchase would be justifiable. If he really did buy the VPN 6 months ahead then he was a fool to leave the subscription dorma…

I really dislike theses kinds of comments in theses kind of posts. This is just bragging. I would like the bad people to be caught and you are just giving away free advice to any future thief like him and also kind of encouraging other people which is kind of worrisome. Privacy is a double edge sword and this is case that I happy that he was caught because of his lack of knowledge.

I don't think I'm saying anything the criminals don't already know. This guy was the head of cloud operations, he knew what a VPN is, how TOR works and how crypto works.

If you're a criminal reading my comments and learning anything new from them, let me tell you this: if you needed this info, you're not smart enough to evade the FBI. Go find a real job or something.

I'm glad the ass got caught and I hope he'll get what he deserves. However, I believe that the common modus operandi for criminals shouldn't be a secret because it will get out anyway. The "solutions" I propose are obvious and basically handed to criminals by the FBI analysis.

Good opsec for crime is incredibly hard, which is great in cases like these. I don't think I've heard of some super smart hacker that's managed to stay away from the authorities unless they live outside the relevant jurisdiction. Even then the FBI will find ways to get you into a country where they can arrest you, legally or otherwise.

A lot of "crime" in some countries, like China or Russia, is just doing the right thing in my opinion. You might very well need this kind of opsec if your goal is to help teenagers learn about homosexuality in many of the more bigoted countries, for example, or get the truth out about COVID without suddenly finding yourself falling out of a window.

I don't think the "true crime" style comments help criminals in any way. Documentaries about how murdered got caught aren't very good manuals and the advice of random people who've been in contact with the police aren't either. If they're dumb enough to follow the advice of some random guy here on orange reddit, their criminal career won't last very long.

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

#167
post #125

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 yet this quote sounds like it comes from a nine year-old. I knew a senior developer doing advanced R&D at a big tech company, who also kept getting suckered into MLM scams.

MLM=Multi Level Marketing

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

#168

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,…

How does one weaponize slack? Github maybe I can understand, but I don't understand how you can weaponize slack.

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

#169
post #66

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…

Having a lawyer doesn't mean you can just not answer questions when subpoenad. "Don't talk to cops" is complicated.

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

#170
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for how one might maintain composure enough to handle these situations if they ever find themselves in them? I imagine the obvious answer is just practice saying "no comment, I need my lawyer present" but I'm not convinced this would make one immune to their Jedi mind tricks when the day comes to exercise it

I have a silly idea. Say the truth, admit you made a lapse of judgment, offer to repair your victims. Silly I know, but maybe you d be surprised this would go a long way in getting out of this shit situation eventually instead of turning everyone into predatory "we ll crush him for eternity" mode ?

It's good that you know it's a silly idea, not sure why you felt the need to share it. Essentially pleading guilty without a lawyer is one of the worse things you could possibly do. It's hard to even know what you are admitting to!
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