The defendant Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov tried to seduce a Russian speaking employee working at the Tesla plant, according to details disclosed in the US District Court in Nevada.
Reaching the unnamed worker via WhatsApp in July, Kriuchkov flew to the US using a Russian passport with a tourist visa and allegedly tried to persuade the worker to betray Tesla.
It is alleged that Kriuchkov first took the worker he met in 2016 on a trip to Lake Tahoe and offered this person $ 1 million to install malware on computer systems in Tesla.
However, the factory worker immediately explained the situation to Tesla, and Tesla officials contacted the FBI. Later, according to Kriuchkov’s subsequent meetings, which were monitored and recorded by federal agents, a program to steal valuable data would first be installed on the factory’s computers, and then the ransomware would be triggered.
Kriuchkov said that they will be camouflaged by a distributed denial of service (DDOs) attack. These types of attacks create unnecessary traffic to the servers, rendering local servers inoperable. If Tesla did not pay, the data would be uploaded to the Internet….
Kriuchkov told the Tesla employee that his organization was running similar “special projects” at other companies, and that a victim had paid a so-called $ 4 million ransom. Kriuchkov mentioned that his institution uses advanced encryption to mask Tesla employee involvement, and that a hacker in his group is a senior employee of a state bank in Russia.
The Nevada office of the US Attorney’s Office did not comment on whether Kriuchkov or any of his partners had ties to the Russian government. Nothing in the criminal report showed that their reasoning was anything other than obtaining money.
Tesla was a financially attractive target. The company leads the US in electric vehicle sales, and with this attack, hackers could gain valuable information from battery chemistry to manufacturing techniques and costs. Tesla claimed that the factory reduced battery cell costs through innovative manufacturing.
Kriuchkov was arrested on August 22, after he left Reno to Los Angeles. He appeared in federal court there on Monday and was charged with conspiring to deliberately damage a protected computer. He began his trial with a five-year prison term and a $ 250,000 fine.
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This blog had been published at www.keepnetlabs.com.
