Security News
A Russian man was sentenced Monday to what amounted to time already served and will be deported after pleading guilty to trying to pay a Tesla employee $500,000 to install computer malware at the company's Nevada electric battery plant in a bid to steal company secrets for ransom. Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, appearing by videoconference from jail, apologized after U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno acknowledged the attempted hack was not successful and the company network was not compromised.
Security researchers Ralf-Philipp Weinmann of Kunnamon, Inc. and Benedikt Schmotzle of Comsecuris GmbH have found remote zero-click security vulnerabilities in an open-source software component used in Tesla automobiles that allowed them to compromise parked cars and control their infotainment systems over WiFi. It would be possible for an attacker to unlock the doors and trunk, change seat positions, both steering and acceleration modes - in short, pretty much what a driver pressing various buttons on the console can do.
Two researchers have shown how a Tesla - and possibly other cars - can be hacked remotely without any user interaction. The analysis was initially carried out for the Pwn2Own 2020 hacking competition - the contest offered a car and other significant prizes for hacking a Tesla - but the findings were later reported to Tesla through its bug bounty program after Pwn2Own organizers decided to temporarily eliminate the automotive category due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday announced updates on two separate cases involving cyberattacks-a Swiss hacktivist and a Russian hacker who planned to plant malware in the Tesla company. A Swiss hacker who was involved in the intrusion of cloud-based surveillance firm Verkada and exposed camera footage from its customers was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday with conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft.
The Russian national who attempted to convince a Tesla employee to plant malware on the company's computers has pleaded guilty, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Thursday. Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, 27, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer.
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 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.
A CCTV camera biz which left an admin account username and password exposed on the World Wide Web has, you guessed it, been targeted by hacktivists. Those cameras belonged to a whole host of organisations, according to the Bloomberg financial newswire, including: Tesla; Cloudflare; hospitals; police stations; prisons and, allegedly, more.
Hackers claim to have breached Silicon Valley startup Verkada to gain unauthorized access to live feeds of 150,000 security cameras. The breach represents a broad vision of the privacy and security violations that can occur if video surveillance footage falls into the wrong hands.
A US hacker collective on Tuesday claimed to have tapped into footage from 150,000 security cameras at banks, jails, schools, carmaker Tesla and other sites to expose "The surveillance state." Images captured from hacked surveillance video were posted on Twitter with an #OperationPanopticon hashtag.