Security News > 2021 > March > Crims with ties to Tesla and SpaceX cuffed for computerized conspiracies

The US Department of Justice has revealed that two sets of crooks have confessed to conspiracies against companies led by Elon Musk.

Twenty-seven year-old Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov travelled to the US in August 2020 to recruit an employee of an unnamed large Nevada-based company to inject data exfiltrating malware into the system in exchange for Bitcoin or cash worth US$1M dollars.

The extracted data was to be used to extort the company in exchange for a ransom, said the official criminal complaint [PDF] filed by the FBI's Las Vegas Field Office.

Whatever the target, the malware would initially have manifested as a distributed denial of Service attack to occupy the company's computer security staff and conceal a second attack, which would exfiltrate the data from the computer network and into the possession of Kriuchkov's organization.

Evidently, Kriuchkov picked the wrong target because the staffer reported the scheme to his employer who then contacted the FBI. In the other plotline, a Florida U.S. Attorney's Office reports that a SpaceX engineer named James Roland Jones - aka "Millionaire Mike" - has pled guilty to insider trading.

"Millionaire Mike" eventually attracted the attention of an undercover FBI employee who tipped him off about activities at a publicly traded US company.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/03/19/musk_crimes/