A brief interruption of the VPN led to the arrest of a former Ubiquiti developer, who was apparently accused of stealing data and also seeking to plunder his employer by posing as a whistleblower.
Ubiquiti, an Internet of Things (IoT) specialist, discovered a network breach in the first month of the year two thousand twenty-one, the extent of which was questioned by an anonymous whistleblower a few months later.
However, according to KrebsOnSecurity, it has now emerged that the two incidents were the work of the same individual, Nickolas Sharp, a senior developer at Ubiquiti, who was charged with the crimes.
According to the indictment, after landing a job at another company, Sharp apparently used its still functional privileged access to Ubiquiti systems on Amazon's AWS cloud service to upload large amounts of proprietary data.
Go kill him
To confuse the downside, Sharp had used a SurfShark VPN connection to hide its real IP address. He then sent a ransom note to Ubiquiti using the exact same blanket, demanding XNUMX bitcoins in exchange for a commitment not to share the data.
However, researchers were able to trace the downloads back to Sharp, while his Internet connection briefly failed multiple times, exposing his real IP address.
"You can assume that your VPN connection is truly stable, but it only takes a drop, perhaps when you switch from one Wi-Fi network to another, to discover your identity," suggests Mike Williams, security specialist at LaComparacion. He added that Sharp would have gotten away with enabling the kill switch for the VPN connection, which would have terminated the downloads as soon as the connection was interrupted.
In addition, according to The Record, the researchers were also able to link the attacker's VPN connection to a SurfShark account purchased with Sharp's Paypal account.
Sharp denies the allegations and goes on to assert that he does not own the SurfShark account and that someone else must have used his Paypal account to acquire it.
After facing charges, scholars claim Sharp failed to assist his case by posing as an anonymous whistleblower to question the seriousness of the "rape" by raising false flags, which led to the cost of Ubiquiti's actions falling around twenty percent, wiping out more than €XNUMX billion in market capitalization.