IT worker hijacked blackmail hack and tried to get £300,000 ransom paid to himself
A former IT security worker tried to hijack a blackmail attempt on his firm by diverting payments to himself.
Ashley Liles, 27, has been jailed for 43 months after being convicted of blackmail and unauthorised access to a computer, with intent to commit other offences.
Liles worked as a security analyst at Oxford BioMedica, one of the main laboratories involved in finding a Covid vaccine.
The cyber firm suffered a security breach and a blackmail attempt against the firm’s former chief executive, Peter Nolan, in February 2018.
The original hackers threatened to leak sensitive company data unless a ransom was paid of £300,000 in Bitcoin.
Liles, who was tasked with helping with the firm’s internal investigation into the security breach, was found to have accessed Nolan’s email 320 times between March 2 and March 9.
The IT worker from Fleetwood, Hertfordshire, went on to create an email address similar to the original hacker’s, and changed payment details to ensure the ransom payment would reach his account instead.
He continued to apply pressure on the firm to go ahead with the payment, although the ransom was never paid.
Detectives were able to track down Liles from internet searches he made from his personal laptop and work computer, including ‘anonymous bitcoin wallet’ and ‘somebody has my bitcoin wallet can they find me?’.
Liles’s defence counsel, Charles Crinion, told Reading Crown Court: ‘He is somewhat at a loss as to how he found himself committing these offences. He has lost a huge amount, a career, a good name, all this time that has been involved in bringing the case to its conclusion.
‘Regarding why he has ended up here, the pre-sentence report author believes it was a lack of maturity. He was 22 years old when he committed these offences.’
Judge Hassan Khan concluded Liles had ‘piggy-backed’ on the attacker’s extortion attempt and had used his privileged position and ‘sophisticated’ IT skills to exploit the company.
He said: ‘The CEO said the consequences of your actions has caused reputational damage and outside litigation costs of £245,000.’
The judge added he had considered a starting point of five years in prison, but reduced it for pleading guilty and other mitigating factors, including Liles’s Chron’s disease diagnosis and his difficult upbringing with an abusive father.
The former Oxford Biomedica employee will have to serve half his sentence before he is considered for parole.
Recently, a court heard how some Bitcoin scammers made so much money – £22 million – they handed it out in the street.
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