He Made $250,000 a Year and Called It Not Enough — So He Staged a Ransomware Attack on His Own Company
The head of Ubiquiti's cloud team decided $250,000 a year wasn't enough, staged an intrusion into his own company and demanded 25 Bitcoin — then got pinned by the MAC address logged on his own home router. Six years in prison.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
The skill they hired him for was the tool he later used to attack them
Nick had worked on video cloud services at AWS's Portland office, one mile from Ubiquiti. In August 2018 he jumped to Ubiquiti to lead the cloud division inside an 800-person team. The company had noticed before hiring him that his AWS skills matched its cloud needs exactly. The role put him in charge of the entire cloud team years later, holding top-level access to the AWS environment, private GitHub repos and Slack — and that résumé is the precondition for the insider attack that followed.
$250,000 wasn't enough because he was comparing himself to a billionaire
Nick earned $250,000 a year and after several years at Ubiquiti rose to head of the cloud team. But his pay growth stopped, and he felt his skills were scarce and undervalued. He measured himself against CEO Robert Pera: roughly the same age, and Pera was already one of the youngest billionaires in the world while Nick was standing still. That psychological imbalance, plus his habit of showing off by finding security problems, led him to the idea of manufacturing a security incident to create a chance to shine.
This wasn't an intrusion — it was access control itself failing
Nick used no backdoor and cracked nothing. At 3 a.m. he logged into AWS with his everyday work credentials, found a key that unlocked the entire credential store, and logged out. Two minutes later another account, hidden behind a different IP, appeared using exactly that key. He ran a get-caller-identity command to confirm who he was, then watched quietly for a week. The whole test proved one thing: Ubiquiti's access management violated least privilege — one employee could freely obtain the keys to every system, and nobody would notice.
What caught him wasn't technology — it was a 30-minute outage
On December 21 he moved for real, cloning private repos over SSH using a shared high-privilege GitHub account. Just as he was nearly done, his home internet dropped. He spent 30 minutes on the phone with his ISP; even with the VPN kill switch on, GitHub logs still recorded a Portland residential IP sitting alongside his VPN IP. He later altered AWS log retention and framed 18 sessions on a DevOps colleague, never knowing that real IP had already become the core evidence for a future conviction. Technical panic, more than hacking skill, decided how the case went.
A $2 million ransom can't move a $23 billion company
On the first morning of the new year, several Ubiquiti executives received an anonymous extortion email: hand over 25 Bitcoin (about $2 million at the time) or the stolen data goes public; pay another 25 Bitcoin and the hacker would reveal the backdoors he'd found. Nick figured the company would pay, citing CWT paying $4.5 million and Garmin possibly paying $10 million. But Ubiquiti was worth over $23 billion — $2 million wasn't painful enough, no ransomware had been deployed, business never stopped, and the company chose to ignore it. He also showed evidence from a public folder to a senior employee via Keybase, and Keybase cooperated with law enforcement to delete the data, killing the extortion plan entirely.
A VPN hides your IP, not your MAC address
Investigators initially found nothing on the company laptop and camera Nick handed over. But examining his home Ubiquiti router revealed that during the attack window a single MacBook had connected to the router over Wi-Fi and transferred traffic matching the volume of the stolen data. A VPN operates at OSI layer 3; the MAC address the router logged comes from layer 2, and a VPN cannot hide it. That became the key pointing to a second computer. Nick didn't hand the MacBook over immediately — he reset it first — but the FBI came with a search warrant on March 24 and seized it anyway.
Revenge wiped out $4 billion in market value, and cost him six years
After being questioned by the FBI, Nick didn't flee or lawyer up. Instead he contacted reporter Brian Krebs anonymously, claiming whistleblower status and saying Ubiquiti lied and downplayed the breach, handing out root access and storing passwords in LastPass. After Krebs's article ‘Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach 'Catastrophic'’ went live, investors sold off for two days, the stock fell 20%, and roughly $4 billion in market value evaporated. Nick also reported to regulators at home and abroad. The thrill of revenge was real, but he was arrested in December 2021, pleaded guilty to three counts in February 2023, and was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison.
In their own words · checked verbatim
He just wanted to be seen, to be heard, to matter.
The hacker has given Ubiquiti an ultimatum; either cough up twenty-five Bitcoin or your stolen data will be published online.
No BTC, he types out. No talk. We done here.
We have evidence you purchased a Surfshark VPN back in July 2020
Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach Catastrophic
The whole thing was just an unsanctioned security drill to make Ubiquiti a safer place.
Figures
| Ubiquiti team size | 800 people | 3:11 |
| Ubiquiti 2020 stock price | doubled | 6:09 |
| CWT ransom case | initially demanded $10 million, paid $4.5 million after negotiation | 7:09 |
| Garmin ransom rumor | demanded $10 million | 7:09 |
| Nick's ransom demand | 25 Bitcoin (about $2 million at the time) plus another 25 Bitcoin for backdoor intelligence | 22:46 |
| Ubiquiti market cap at the time | over $23 billion | 22:46 |
| Sentence | six years in prison; pleaded guilty to three counts in February 2023 | 34:31 |
Glossary
- least privilege
- Users should hold only the minimum access their job requires; Ubiquiti violated this, which is why the insider could grab a ring of keys.
- VPN kill switch
- Automatically blocks network traffic when the VPN drops, preventing the real IP from leaking; Nick had it on and still left an IP behind.
- MAC address
- The hardware address of a network card, operating at layer 2; a VPN masks only the IP, never the MAC.
How to listen
Cloud infrastructure leads, corporate security teams, and anyone who holds top-level company access and thinks they're underpaid.
The sandwich-thief cold open at 0:00-3:11 has nothing to do with the main story; skip it if you're short on time.