FBI with a Tesla Employee’s Help Stops Malware Attack

Cyber Security remains problematic in the auto industry as it electrifies.

Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov plead guilty to offering a Tesla employee $1 million to inject malware into the company’s battery plant in Nevada, according to Upstream Security*. The Tesla employee informed the company and cooperated with the FBI who stopped the plot at its inception.

Kriuchkov planned to cripple Tesla’s electric battery plant in Nevada with ransomware and steal company secrets for extortion. Furthermore, it was alleged that Kriuchkov acted on behalf of co-conspirators abroad and attempted to use face-to-face bribery to recruit the insider. The goal of the insider was to physically plant a ransomware which scrambles data on targeted networks and can only be unlocked with a software key provided by the attackers.

*Upstream Security was founded by Yoav Levy (CEO) and Yonatan Appel (CTO), two security professionals with more than 20 years of experience. “They understood that the automotive market is undergoing a massive disruption, potentially greater than the one experienced by the  mobile phone industry and that this disruption will require radically different security solutions in order to reach its potential – automotive cybersecurity solutions purpose-built for the automotive industry and its unique challenges,” according to Upstream.