The cybercriminals offered USD 1 million worth of Bitcoin to install malware on Tesla’s network. After an undercover operation, the FBI managed to capture one of the alleged attackers.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that “this was a serious attack,” referring to a ransomware or data hijacking attempt involving Bitcoin payment. This event could have seriously affected the electric car manufacturer. The company and the FBI took swift action that managed to foil plans to put one of the company’s assembly facilities at risk.
In recent days, the US Department of Justice reported that the FBI captured 27-year-old Russian citizen Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov for having acted in a conspiracy. The agency does not specify who the incident was against, but Musk’s tweet confirmed that the reported Nevada Company was Tesla.
According to the report, Kriuchkov offered to pay USD 1 million worth of Bitcoin to an electrical engineer at Tesla’s Gigafactory (lithium-ion battery factory) to introduce malicious software onto the computer network. The goal was to steal the company’s patents, and intellectual property, and then request several million US dollars of ransom for not leaking those data.
Kriuchkov and the employee, who remains anonymous in the report, had allegedly met in 2016but contacted each other again via WhatsApp last July. Kriuchkov then traveled on a tourist visa to Nevada, where the two men spoke face-to-face several times between August 1st and 20th, according to the official report.
After some meetings, Kriuchkov formally proposed the employee to introduce malware into Gigafactory’s internal computer system. To do this, the cybercriminal offered to use a malicious accessory to corrupt the system.
Attack on Tesla as Desperate Plan to Get Bitcoin
Fortunately for Tesla, the employee did not lend himself to the attack but decided to alert the executives of the company, who in turn informed the authorities. Although the criminal offered to give him USD 1 to damage the servers of the battery factory, the employee preferred to warn his employer. He even served as a double agent on behalf of the FBI for several days.
According to the report, the FBI recorded a meeting between the attacker and the employee at a Reno gas station in Nevada. This was a part of its undercover operation. At that time, the cybercriminal explained the details of the blackmail plan. Soon after, Kriuchov was arrested in Los Angeles.
The FBI said that Kriuchov was working with a group that planned similar attacks on companies. They lure employees by offering to pay them huge amounts of US dollars or euros in Bitcoin, in exchange for installing malware. The agency added that one of these targets was the logistics company CWT Group, which reportedly paid USD 4.5 million for a similar ransomware attack last July.
The situation around Tesla makes it clear that hackers are increasingly confident or desperate, daring to travel and show their faces. At other times, attackers take advantage of vulnerabilities in online systems without resorting to physical presence to infect their victims.
By Willmen Blanco
