A 28-year-old man from the United Kingdom, Ashley Liles, has been convicted of unauthorized computer access with criminal intent and blackmailing his employer in Fleetwood, Hertfordshire.
Yesterday, the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) released a press statement providing details of the case. Liles worked as an IT Security Analyst for an Oxford-based company that experienced a ransomware attack in February 2018.
In line with typical ransomware attack procedures, the perpetrators contacted the company’s executives and demanded a ransom payment. Liles actively participated in the internal investigation and incident response, collaborating with other employees and the police.
However, during this process, Liles allegedly devised a plan to capitalize on the attack by tricking his employer into paying him a ransom instead of the original external attacker.
According to the SEROCU announcement, Liles secretly carried out a separate and secondary attack on the company without the knowledge of the police, his colleagues, or his employer. He repeatedly accessed a board member’s personal emails and manipulated the original blackmail email by altering the payment destination provided by the initial attacker.
The objective was to exploit the situation and redirect the payment to a cryptocurrency wallet under Liles’ control. Additionally, Liles created an email address that closely resembled that of the original attacker, through which he sent emails to the employer, exerting pressure to make the payment, as stated by SEROCU.
However, the company owner refused to pay the ransom. Ongoing internal investigations uncovered Liles’ unauthorized access to private emails, ultimately tracing it back to his home’s IP address.
Although Liles became aware that the investigations were closing in on him, he managed to delete all data from his personal devices before the cyber-crime team from SEROCU raided his home to seize his computer. Nevertheless, incriminating evidence was successfully recovered.
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