Recently, a Tesla employee in Nevada based Tesla Gigafactory was offered 1 million dollars in August just to hack the services of his own company. The hacker was a 27 year old Russian namely Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov. The hacker communicated with the employee of Tesla through WhatsApp messages. Tesla employee and the hacker had met way before this scenario. The hacker called victim for an in-person meeting and started to make an offer to him. Tesla employee was offered the first payment of $500,000 and then 1 million dollars in cash or in Bitcoin as per his choice.
The main aim of the hacker was to install ransomware in the car’s company network situated in Nevada. The hacker made his pitch pretty clear. According to the US Justice Department, this attack could have extorted millions of currency from the company. The Tesla employee was asked by the hacker to install the malware in the car’s company network by opening a malicious email attachment or use an infected USB stick to infiltrate the company’s network.
The CEO of Tesla Elon Musk also confirmed the attack on Twitter. The CEO called this attack as a serious attack. The US Federal Bureau Of Investigation also covered the attack. Most importantly the employee alerted the Federal Bureau for the plans of the hacker. The employee was kind of honest in this scenario and reported everything to the authorities. If the employee of one company carries on a cyber attack then it is very difficult to overcome it.
The employee also addresses that the ransomware which was developed by the hacker cost around dollar 250,000 to develop. The main aim of the program was to steal the company’s file and threaten to release the data. The attacker was kind of experience in his job because he was also fishing some other victims besides Tesla. Although, he was arrested by the Justice Department of the US.
