To hack Tesla, a hacker offered $ 1 million to an employee

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A Tesla employee turned down a hacker’s $ 1 million offer to deploy ransomware.

Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a 27-year-old Russian citizen ultimately failed to achieve his goal. The young man wanted to bribe a Tesla employee to deploy ransomware targeting the automaker’s Gigafactory located in Nevada.

Tesla employee didn’t give in
To do this, he offered the Tesla employee the amount of one million dollars in Bitcoin or in cash, a tempting sum that did not however make the man crack. The latter made the decision to notify the American company as well as the competent authorities, which led to the arrest of the hacker. The FBI arrested him earlier this week in Los Angeles as he was leaving the country, a public complaint attests. He is believed to be the perpetrator of previous cyberattacks, but the targets have not been made public.

Elon Musk, for his part, confirmed the information by reacting to the article in specialized media Teslarati. He said it

was a “serious attack”.

In detail, Kriuchkov traveled to the US to contact a Tesla employee who spoke Russian and worked at the Gigafactory in question. The two chatted via WhatsApp and met in July, knowing that the employee would suggest to the hacker he was going to accept. What he didn’t do.

The attacker offered to deploy the malware so that he could then obtain a ransom from the company, otherwise he would make the data public.

This is a common situation caused by the deployment of ransomware, since the ransomware blocks information inside computers. Victims must then pay a ransom, often in Bitcoin, to gain access to their data again. Businesses are regularly targeted by these kinds of attacks – like Garmin this summer, it’s no wonder Tesla is. For its part, Garmin would have paid part of the amount requested by the hackers to unblock the situation.