3 ms·

You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? This whole thing

You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? This whole thing pisses me off. A insider threatened a company with reputational damage and used a press guy to pull it up. HN picked it up and amplified it. Press guy never corrected the story, and the here we are - with people still railing on HN for a untrue story that the press guy enable that the extortionist planted.

brightball 5y ago
Their stock dropped by about 30% after that as well didn’t it?
draw_down 5y ago
Well, if you think you might be having a reputational problem, sue someone for defamation. That way you remove all doubt.
newsclues 5y ago
Yeah I’m also pissed off that they failed to have policy in place to prevent an insider threat and deal with it afterwards.
- InTheArena 5y ago
  It's almost impossible to prevent a trusted insider attack. It is possible to quickly identify and shut down a insider. I think the second is a bigger issue - they did (obv) identify the attacker - but they had the FBI involved at that point.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    No it's virtually impossible to prevent it. It's very important to detect it though and to have a playbook in place on how to deal with it.
    - newsclues 5y ago
      Can’t prevent everything true but they pulled a Robert Hansen!
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Good policy will prevent you from assigning the person responsible for the breach to the team to investigate themselves, I think the FBI learned that the hard way. Ubiquiti did not have good security policy as stated in the hacker news post from 3 months ago (cred open to many people etc). While it’s impossible to completely prevent this, best practices were not followed.
JacobThreeThree 5y ago
If that's the case, maybe this is a rare case where it makes sense to sue for defamation. Krebs does tend to just throw stuff on the wall. Conversely, people should not be so influenced by one security blogger.
- kraussvonespy 5y ago
  The press across the board does a terrible job of printing retractions. I know that doesn't really excuse Krebs but most errors don't get corrected and those that do generally show up in a tiny column in the middle of the paper. If you're Brian Krebs and are writing, editing and publishing this stuff yourself, I don't know that you'd have the bandwidth to be able to monitor and correct every new development in something you've written. The New Yorker has a staff of hundreds of fact checkers, lawyers and proof readers just to keep them out of court, and they too seem to have a difficult time with publishing corrections. I'm not excusing either party, there are issues here that need to be resolved. But the expectation that any part of the press, be it publishing a physical newspaper or running a security blog, will spend much time paying attention to old stories for corrections doesn't match up with reality.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    According to some other posts here, Krebs did publish updates and retractions as new info came out.
    - kraussvonespy 5y ago
      Wow, I didn't know that. If that's the case then Krebs is far beyond what 99% of large news outlets, magazines and other news sources bother to do. I was on the fence before about this but if that's the case, I'm fully on Krebs' side here.
Someone1234 5y ago
> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? It arguably started when they: - Shipped tons of jobs overseas, and firmware quality took a noise-dive. - Stopped letting people run the NVR on their own hardware (with short-notice). - Required cloud login and an app for setup (something that, for years, NOT having was a claimed Unifi advantage). - Constantly introducing and retiring half-baked ideas/products/lines. The whole company has lost focus and certainly lost quality. The recent security kerfuffle certainly didn't help, but mostly it reminded people that their previously "local only" stuff was now Cloud Connected™ by force, and that UB lost the keys that users didn't want to exist to begin with.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I also remember Ubiquiti quality declining before this Krebs business, and finding out that Ubiquiti had offshored much of the business in recent years.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  OMG. I just realized that the next logical step in that process is: - Got acquired by Cisco. Heaven help us.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I don't think Cisco will do this. They already have a budget product line. Which is said to be pretty mediocre but if course it has to be not to cannibalise their enterprise offering.
    - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      Linksys is strictly unknowledgeable home-use kit, whereas Ubiquiti could be called "prosumer," and Cisco doesn't have anything in the price range. When I built out a new, 1500-seat church, Ubiquity offered better-spec'd wifi AP's for less than half the price of comparable gear from Cisco. Would I do it again, knowing what a hassle their administration software is, and how often it breaks? I don't know.
bombcar 5y ago
The security kerfuffle is meh. Forcing everything to cloud-connected is what turned me off. I don't need the devices I use to connect to the cloud to be dependent on the cloud.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  Yeah, it sucks that every manufacturer out there seems to think that they need to move to a subscription model for everything.
merlyn 5y ago
That vibe existed far before the Krebs article. Mostly from how the company has shifted their focus as described in other posts.
JaimeThompson 5y ago
Having used their products for years the "ubiquiti sucks" mood has been their own fault. Product quality has declined, they keep promising features that don't work / kill throughput / just don't come out for months if ever.
avsteele 5y ago
Speaking only for myself I disagree. I only had vague notion of them, but read Krebs on occasion, but didn't have any strong feelings on them ... until this. As long as the info in the 1st post form the lawyer is correct, I wouldn't buy from them
linsomniac 5y ago
"Ubiquiti sucks" started for me when a switch firmware update enabled some loop detection that couldn't be turned off, and completely broke my Google WiFi setup. Support tried, but ultimately the solution was to connect Google WiFi to a dumb switch. Then around a year later an update bricked 4 of my 5 cameras, and support was completely useless. You know, and then they had this huge security issue. Sure, Krebs reported the security issue, but "ubiquiti sucks" sentiment has largely been Ubiquiti's doing IMHO.
nodesocket 5y ago
Thank you for saying what nobody else on HN will say. Instead it’s just constant outrage on HN against companies. Why didn’t Krebs issue a public apology or retraction? I love Ubiquiti and have over $2k worth of UniFi equipment in my home. This entire fiasco has hurt Ubiquiti’s brand and reputation, and in no small part Krebs is responsible for that.
JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
1. Krebs corrected the story. Twice. You just have to open the original article to see it. 2. The "Ubiquiti sucks" mood started with Ubiquiti releasing shit products with even shittier software that, quite incredibly, sometimes even degraded with updates.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  Point 1 is correct insofar as he published an update to it in December.[1] He did not (and does not) make it clear that the employee who was arrested was his source.[2] In fact his anonymous source "Adam" is never referenced anywhere in his second article, outside of comments asking him about it. If you read his reporting on this now, it is still not clear that "Adam", his source, and the person committing the alleged offences are the same person. It may be he doesn't know but he certainly makes zero effort in either article to address the question. Ubiquiti's forced cloud BS is more than enough reason for people to move away from them -- they basically dropped out of consideration for my purposes after they did that. It can also be true that there was a drop in stock price when this incident was reported, and further drops after Krebs' coverage.[3] In fact he even discusses their share price at the tail end of his original article, even updating it on March 31 and acknowledging a roughly $50 drop following his reporting. I doubt Ubiquiti will win this court case but I do think Krebs damaged his own credibility here. [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-breach-catastrophic/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-b... [2]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charged-with-extortion-causing-2020-breach/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg... [3]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/ui-stock?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/ui-stock?op=1
  - genmud 5y ago
    Has it 100% been confirmed that Adam == Sharp? There are certainly allegations that Sharp talked with the media, but on breaches like this there are typically multiple people working them with detailed knowledge. The timing is suspect, but with cases like this, you have to prove that someone did it out of malice. It also doesn't mention anywhere in the indictment who Sharp spoke with, so until it goes to trial... unless Krebs confirms that it was Sharp that contacted him, these are just assumptions/allegations and not something that have been proven one way or the other.
smaudet 5y ago
It's not defamatory though - if people decide "yeah you probably suck" but its because of what someone else said, it's arguably up to them to show the person who originally spoke was defaming. You can't sue journalists for this. Now, it sounds like they have a bunch of other (factually correct) nonsense going on, they had a leak, suing to try to stop is just an incredibly bad look. I don't even know who Ubiquiti is, but fuck them, they sound like aholes to me.
phatfish 5y ago
I put them on a personal black list when there was some shenanigans with them using GPL code and not releasing their modified source, or something. That was years ago.
elric 5y ago
I think you're mistaking a correlation for causation here. Yes, people started saying "UI sucks for $reasonXZY" a lot more after these articles came out, but that's merely because the articles provided a convenient hook to which to attach existing grievances. A random "Tell HN: UI sucks because their firmware went down hill"-post is not likely to go anywhere. But as a comment within an article about UI, sure, that works. There are many things wrong with UI. An inflated insider security story does not change that.
aserdf 5y ago
a few weeks ago UI released an update to their protect surveillance line which subsequently prevented certain cameras from recording. an update which fixed this "bug" was released 3 days ago. things like this contribute more to the mood you reference than the reporting from Krebs a year ago, IMO.
dogleash 5y ago
> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? Their product direction changed and they're no longer my go-to. It appeared to kill a lot of goodwill from others too. On the other hand, I hadn't even heard Krebs was going after them until today.
- emmelaich 5y ago
  For example, Troy Hunt was a major fan, but then just stopped writing about them. I took that as an un-recommend. https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/ubiquiti/ https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/ubiquiti/
  - troyhunt 5y ago
    Not at all, I continued writing a lot on Twitter and still love the product. I don’t like the way they’re handling this situation though, more in this vid from a few days ago: https://www.troyhunt.com/weekly-update-289/ https://www.troyhunt.com/weekly-update-289/
    - emmelaich 5y ago
      Thanks for your response Troy!
ellen364 5y ago
> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? Nobody’s posted a “Ubiquiti sucks” thread from before the Krebs kerfuffle, so here’s one from Nov 2019. In that thread, people complain about a new “phone home” feature and Ubiquiti ignoring the terms of the GPL. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430997
KennyBlanken 5y ago
"Ubiquiti sucks" is not an HN-specific thing. The consensus among IT folks in multiple communities I'm part of is that they've gone from being front-of-the-tech-curve with nice UI that Just Works, to overpriced underspec'd cloud-locked-in meh-ness.

brightball 5y ago

Their stock dropped by about 30% after that as well didn’t it?

draw_down 5y ago

Well, if you think you might be having a reputational problem, sue someone for defamation. That way you remove all doubt.

newsclues 5y ago

Yeah I’m also pissed off that they failed to have policy in place to prevent an insider threat and deal with it afterwards.

InTheArena 5y ago
It's almost impossible to prevent a trusted insider attack. It is possible to quickly identify and shut down a insider. I think the second is a bigger issue - they did (obv) identify the attacker - but they had the FBI involved at that point.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  No it's virtually impossible to prevent it. It's very important to detect it though and to have a playbook in place on how to deal with it.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    Can’t prevent everything true but they pulled a Robert Hansen!
- newsclues 5y ago
  Good policy will prevent you from assigning the person responsible for the breach to the team to investigate themselves, I think the FBI learned that the hard way. Ubiquiti did not have good security policy as stated in the hacker news post from 3 months ago (cred open to many people etc). While it’s impossible to completely prevent this, best practices were not followed.

JacobThreeThree 5y ago

If that's the case, maybe this is a rare case where it makes sense to sue for defamation. Krebs does tend to just throw stuff on the wall. Conversely, people should not be so influenced by one security blogger.

kraussvonespy 5y ago
The press across the board does a terrible job of printing retractions. I know that doesn't really excuse Krebs but most errors don't get corrected and those that do generally show up in a tiny column in the middle of the paper. If you're Brian Krebs and are writing, editing and publishing this stuff yourself, I don't know that you'd have the bandwidth to be able to monitor and correct every new development in something you've written. The New Yorker has a staff of hundreds of fact checkers, lawyers and proof readers just to keep them out of court, and they too seem to have a difficult time with publishing corrections. I'm not excusing either party, there are issues here that need to be resolved. But the expectation that any part of the press, be it publishing a physical newspaper or running a security blog, will spend much time paying attention to old stories for corrections doesn't match up with reality.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  According to some other posts here, Krebs did publish updates and retractions as new info came out.
  - kraussvonespy 5y ago
    Wow, I didn't know that. If that's the case then Krebs is far beyond what 99% of large news outlets, magazines and other news sources bother to do. I was on the fence before about this but if that's the case, I'm fully on Krebs' side here.

Someone1234 5y ago

> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? It arguably started when they: - Shipped tons of jobs overseas, and firmware quality took a noise-dive. - Stopped letting people run the NVR on their own hardware (with short-notice). - Required cloud login and an app for setup (something that, for years, NOT having was a claimed Unifi advantage). - Constantly introducing and retiring half-baked ideas/products/lines. The whole company has lost focus and certainly lost quality. The recent security kerfuffle certainly didn't help, but mostly it reminded people that their previously "local only" stuff was now Cloud Connected™ by force, and that UB lost the keys that users didn't want to exist to begin with.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I also remember Ubiquiti quality declining before this Krebs business, and finding out that Ubiquiti had offshored much of the business in recent years.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
OMG. I just realized that the next logical step in that process is: - Got acquired by Cisco. Heaven help us.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I don't think Cisco will do this. They already have a budget product line. Which is said to be pretty mediocre but if course it has to be not to cannibalise their enterprise offering.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    Linksys is strictly unknowledgeable home-use kit, whereas Ubiquiti could be called "prosumer," and Cisco doesn't have anything in the price range. When I built out a new, 1500-seat church, Ubiquity offered better-spec'd wifi AP's for less than half the price of comparable gear from Cisco. Would I do it again, knowing what a hassle their administration software is, and how often it breaks? I don't know.

bombcar 5y ago

The security kerfuffle is meh. Forcing everything to cloud-connected is what turned me off. I don't need the devices I use to connect to the cloud to be dependent on the cloud.

BeefWellington 5y ago
Yeah, it sucks that every manufacturer out there seems to think that they need to move to a subscription model for everything.

merlyn 5y ago

That vibe existed far before the Krebs article. Mostly from how the company has shifted their focus as described in other posts.

JaimeThompson 5y ago

Having used their products for years the "ubiquiti sucks" mood has been their own fault. Product quality has declined, they keep promising features that don't work / kill throughput / just don't come out for months if ever.

avsteele 5y ago

Speaking only for myself I disagree. I only had vague notion of them, but read Krebs on occasion, but didn't have any strong feelings on them ... until this. As long as the info in the 1st post form the lawyer is correct, I wouldn't buy from them

linsomniac 5y ago

"Ubiquiti sucks" started for me when a switch firmware update enabled some loop detection that couldn't be turned off, and completely broke my Google WiFi setup. Support tried, but ultimately the solution was to connect Google WiFi to a dumb switch. Then around a year later an update bricked 4 of my 5 cameras, and support was completely useless. You know, and then they had this huge security issue. Sure, Krebs reported the security issue, but "ubiquiti sucks" sentiment has largely been Ubiquiti's doing IMHO.

nodesocket 5y ago

Thank you for saying what nobody else on HN will say. Instead it’s just constant outrage on HN against companies. Why didn’t Krebs issue a public apology or retraction? I love Ubiquiti and have over $2k worth of UniFi equipment in my home. This entire fiasco has hurt Ubiquiti’s brand and reputation, and in no small part Krebs is responsible for that.

JustFinishedBSG 5y ago

1. Krebs corrected the story. Twice. You just have to open the original article to see it. 2. The "Ubiquiti sucks" mood started with Ubiquiti releasing shit products with even shittier software that, quite incredibly, sometimes even degraded with updates.

BeefWellington 5y ago
Point 1 is correct insofar as he published an update to it in December.[1] He did not (and does not) make it clear that the employee who was arrested was his source.[2] In fact his anonymous source "Adam" is never referenced anywhere in his second article, outside of comments asking him about it. If you read his reporting on this now, it is still not clear that "Adam", his source, and the person committing the alleged offences are the same person. It may be he doesn't know but he certainly makes zero effort in either article to address the question. Ubiquiti's forced cloud BS is more than enough reason for people to move away from them -- they basically dropped out of consideration for my purposes after they did that. It can also be true that there was a drop in stock price when this incident was reported, and further drops after Krebs' coverage.[3] In fact he even discusses their share price at the tail end of his original article, even updating it on March 31 and acknowledging a roughly $50 drop following his reporting. I doubt Ubiquiti will win this court case but I do think Krebs damaged his own credibility here. [1]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-breach-catastrophic/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-b... [2]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charged-with-extortion-causing-2020-breach/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg... [3]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/ui-stock?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/ui-stock?op=1
- genmud 5y ago
  Has it 100% been confirmed that Adam == Sharp? There are certainly allegations that Sharp talked with the media, but on breaches like this there are typically multiple people working them with detailed knowledge. The timing is suspect, but with cases like this, you have to prove that someone did it out of malice. It also doesn't mention anywhere in the indictment who Sharp spoke with, so until it goes to trial... unless Krebs confirms that it was Sharp that contacted him, these are just assumptions/allegations and not something that have been proven one way or the other.

smaudet 5y ago

It's not defamatory though - if people decide "yeah you probably suck" but its because of what someone else said, it's arguably up to them to show the person who originally spoke was defaming. You can't sue journalists for this. Now, it sounds like they have a bunch of other (factually correct) nonsense going on, they had a leak, suing to try to stop is just an incredibly bad look. I don't even know who Ubiquiti is, but fuck them, they sound like aholes to me.

phatfish 5y ago

I put them on a personal black list when there was some shenanigans with them using GPL code and not releasing their modified source, or something. That was years ago.

elric 5y ago

I think you're mistaking a correlation for causation here. Yes, people started saying "UI sucks for $reasonXZY" a lot more after these articles came out, but that's merely because the articles provided a convenient hook to which to attach existing grievances. A random "Tell HN: UI sucks because their firmware went down hill"-post is not likely to go anywhere. But as a comment within an article about UI, sure, that works. There are many things wrong with UI. An inflated insider security story does not change that.

aserdf 5y ago

a few weeks ago UI released an update to their protect surveillance line which subsequently prevented certain cameras from recording. an update which fixed this "bug" was released 3 days ago. things like this contribute more to the mood you reference than the reporting from Krebs a year ago, IMO.

dogleash 5y ago

> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? Their product direction changed and they're no longer my go-to. It appeared to kill a lot of goodwill from others too. On the other hand, I hadn't even heard Krebs was going after them until today.

emmelaich 5y ago
For example, Troy Hunt was a major fan, but then just stopped writing about them. I took that as an un-recommend. https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/ubiquiti/ https://www.troyhunt.com/tag/ubiquiti/
- troyhunt 5y ago
  Not at all, I continued writing a lot on Twitter and still love the product. I don’t like the way they’re handling this situation though, more in this vid from a few days ago: https://www.troyhunt.com/weekly-update-289/ https://www.troyhunt.com/weekly-update-289/
  - emmelaich 5y ago
    Thanks for your response Troy!

ellen364 5y ago

> You do realize that the entire "ubiquiti sucks" mood on HN started with the publications of these (factually inaccurate) articles from Krebs? Nobody’s posted a “Ubiquiti sucks” thread from before the Krebs kerfuffle, so here’s one from Nov 2019. In that thread, people complain about a new “phone home” feature and Ubiquiti ignoring the terms of the GPL. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430997

KennyBlanken 5y ago

"Ubiquiti sucks" is not an HN-specific thing. The consensus among IT folks in multiple communities I'm part of is that they've gone from being front-of-the-tech-curve with nice UI that Just Works, to overpriced underspec'd cloud-locked-in meh-ness.