Security News > 2021 > March > Russian pleads guilty to Tesla hacking and extortion attempt
Russian national Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov has pleaded guilty to recruiting a Tesla employee to plant malware designed to steal data within the network of Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory.
Kriuchkov also told the Tesla employee that he was earlier involved in other similar "Projects" where one of the victim companies paid $4 million after negotiating down from an initial $6 million ransom.
The Tesla employee was also told that during their "Special project" targeting Tesla's network, the criminals would launch a Distributed Denial of Service attack to divert attention from the insider's attempt to deploy malware.
The 27-year-old defendant's plans were thwarted by the FBI after the Tesla employee revealed Kriuchkov's attempts to recruit him via WhatsApp and in multiple face-to-face meetings where they discussed details of the conspiracy.
Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, later confirmed in a Twitter reply that Kriuchkov was indeed trying to recruit a Tesla employee to help with his extortion scheme.
"The swift response of the company and the FBI prevented a major exfiltration of the victim company's data and stopped the extortion scheme at its inception," Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said.