According to a press release of US FBI, Tesla the $400 Billion electric car making company was saved from a major cyber attack by one of its unnamed employee on a recent note as a major Russian Cyber Attack was averted from crippling the IT Infrastructure of Nevada’s Gigafactory.
The documents released by FBI on Aug 22, 2020, say that a 27-year-old Russian hacker named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov was involved in the incident and was arrested by the law enforcement from an apartment in Los Angeles.
Highly placed sources say that Mr. Egor was working for Russian Intelligence and was assigned a project to steal millions worth of documents from the Tesla’s battery making factory in Nevada through malware. So, as soon as Egor landed in Nevada on Visiting Visa in July this year, he started contacting a Tesla employee familiar with Russian language to fulfill his digital conspiracy of introducing ransomware into the internal network of Tesla to exfiltrate data to remote servers.
Although the employee agreed to help Egor for monetary benefits; he alerted his senior officials at Tesla about the attack, who then contacted FBI to launch a serious investigation.
FBI then launched a secret operation to track down Kriuchkov by asking the Tesla employee to meet the Russian for more discussions related to the attack and fees. And at a point when Mr. Egor offered $1 million to the employee for the hack job, the officials nabbed him with enough evidence to prove the crime.
Tesla Chief Elon Musk tweeted about the attempted hack story published in Teslarati.com yesterday and appreciated the employee for turning down $1 million. The Boss of the Tesla Model X manufacturing company is also intending to felicitate the employee with an apt reward soon.
Note- Teslarati is an online media resource that only publishes content related to Tesla, SpaceX and other related ventures of Elon Musk.
