A Tesla Inc. logo is reflected in the glass of a closed showroom in San Diego.
Bloomberg News
Elon Musk confirmed Thursday that the gig factory of Tesla Inc. in Nevada was the target of a cyberattack that was banished by the FBI.
The blog Teslarati reported on Thursday that a Russian man approached a factory worker via the WhatsApp app in July, offering him $ 1 million to install malware on Tesla’s internal network that would cause a widespread attack on services. While Tesla’s cybersecurity team was distracted by the DDoS attack, the malware would gain access to trade secrets that the hackers could have for ransom. Instead, the worker reported it to Tesla officials, who alerted the FBI. He pretended to agree with the plan and carried a thread at future meetings with the Russian man, who was arrested on August 22 in Los Angeles in an apparent attempt to flee the US
In a tweet response to the Teslarati report, Musk confirmed “This was a serious attack.”
The Teslarati report follows a criminal complaint filed Aug. 23 in the U.S. District Court in Nevada accusing Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a Russian citizen, of trying to recruit a worker to introduce malware into an unknown company.
“The purpose of the collusion was to recruit an employee of a company to criminally send malware delivered by the coconspirators to the company’s computer system, to filter out data from the company’s network, and to threaten the data online. opening, unless the company pays the ransom for the coconspirators. requirement, ”the Justice Department said in the submission.
Tesla TSLA,
did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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