“Through Katie Nichols’ tweet, I was inspired to start ransomware that no one really knows the full impact of cybercrime and ransomware in particular,” she told Cable TechCrunch. Jack Cable, a security architect for the Krebs Stamos Group who previously worked for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), is trying to solve that problem by launching a public release tracking website. However, as ransom attacks continue to make headlines, it is almost impossible to understand their full impact, and as cybercriminals pay to demand their release – it is not known whether some decisions have been made. The world, and just this month IT supply chain Cassia was hit by a supply chain attack that saw hundreds of streams of people locked out of their systems. The last few months have seen the only attack on the Colon Colonial Pipeline that forced the company to cut off most of its east coast – and its gas supply, a hack from meat supplier JBS that abruptly shut down its slaughterhouse. These file-encrypting attacks continue unabated this year. It's worth noting that Ubiquity is not actually named in the DoJ's indictment or press release, but it's clear that the charges are related to the Ubiquiti hack.As the number of attacks increases in 2020, ransomware attacks are driven by the unrest caused by the Covid-19 epidemic has become lucrative for cybercriminals. Each of these charges carry a maximum prison sentence ranging between two and 20 years. Sharp has been charged with transmitting a program to a protected computer that intentionally caused damage, transmission of an interstate threat, wire fraud, and making false statements to the FBI. When Ubiquiti issued a statement in response to Krebs’ article, the company said it had evidence that someone with “intricate knowledge” of its cloud infrastructure had been the perpetrator. In addition, at one point, an internet outage at Sharp’s home caused a problem with Surfshark, which resulted in his real IP address being used to access Ubiquiti systems. The unauthorized access to Ubiquiti systems was done though the Surfshark VPN, but the Surfshark subscription had been purchased with a PayPal account registered to Sharp. The FBI had identified him based on an IP address and a PayPal account. Sharp was assigned to the team investigating the apparent breach and, in January, he sent Ubiquiti a ransom note claiming to be an anonymous hacker and threatening to leak the stolen information unless he was paid 50 bitcoin - worth roughly $1.9 million at the time.Īuthorities also claim that Sharp was the “whistleblower” who reached out to Brian Krebs in late March to claim that the breach had been more serious than Ubiquiti admitted.īefore Krebs published his article in late March, the FBI executed a search warrant at Sharp’s home in Portland. On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced charges against a former Ubiquiti employee and shared information on what allegedly happened between December 2020 and March 2021.Īccording to the FBI, 36-year-old Nickolas Sharp of Portland, Oregon, who had been employed by Ubiquiti since August 2018, was behind the “hack.” He apparently simply misused his administrative access to download gigabytes of confidential data from the company’s GitHub and AWS servers. The source told Krebs at the time that the attacker had gained root access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including credentials and other sensitive information. This led to a significant drop in the value of Ubiquiti shares. In late March, someone claiming to be an Ubiquiti employee involved in investigating the incident contacted cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs, claiming that the company had downplayed the impact of what they described as a “catastrophic” breach. The company said at the time that it had no evidence of user data being compromised, but couldn’t definitively rule it out, so it advised customers to change their password as a precaution. The US-based communications and IoT device maker informed customers in January that it had suffered a data breach related to a cloud services provider. The hacker attack disclosed by Ubiquiti in January 2021 was actually conducted by a former employee, according to the Justice Department, which announced charges against the individual on Wednesday.
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