He could have had an amazing business, but his arrogance on controlling everything caused his downfall.
He gave his business opponent the means to destroy him
He has completely ruined his parents reputation, and may very well take them down with him
He's looking at spending the rest of his life in prison
There will be one or more three letter agencies helping the various Agencies to lock him up forever. If anyone makes the point that his services may have been used for money laundering or assisting terrorists then everyone will be involved - FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.
VPN"s are not magic - they don't provide protection against on-host malware or other cyber-security tools. Who owns the VPN? Lots of luck buying an encrypted satellite connection with the name 'Sam Bankman-Fried' - his name and face is too well known. Don't ascribe to genius that which can be explained by good luck.
Letting him have access and wire-tapping his systems could be an even smarter thing.
Given the massive amount of money involved I'd leave the door open for him to transfer funds out, record everything he does as evidence, and freeze the funds the moment they convert to cash.
The POC was demonstrated on a piece of commercial equipment (no names - given the time that has passed it would not be fair) where the device internally used a 3rd party GPS module rather than a solution integrated into the main PCB. It was trivial to unscrew the lid, tap into this connection and manipulate/substitute the legitimate NMEA data with a modified version. This resulted in my backyard clothesline becoming a commercial fishing vessel several hundred kilometres inshore.
The security of any tracking solution is only as good as the level of trust you have in the installation of the monitoring technology. If the AIS system takes its GPS input data from another system then the attack is even simpler. If you rely on the vessel owner to install and not tamper with the tracking equipment, you need a good field inspection regime to detect such activity and sufficiently strong deterrents to stop people from trying this.
In the 90's there was test equipment available which could simulate the GPS constellation and supply whatever co-ordinates you wanted via RF. These days GNU radio would probably make it even cheaper.
If Windward have or are developing an AI solution to correlate AIS data with near-realtime satellite data they could be on a winner here. It may not necessarily identify who the bad actors are, but it would definitely help identify those vessels which are reporting accurately, and would be a fantastic tool for resource management, law enforcement, and general naval traffic to manage the risks that this kind of behaviour creates. It would be a nice little earner
There is a final fifth layer that needs to be solved
Details on the Australian Broadcasting Commissions web site at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F20...
So sad.
So I think we are beyond something as simple as segregating the management plane form the Internet, more along the line that someone else already owns your servers.
The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes.