Tesla targeted in extortion plot
In a tweet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk solved a mystery involving a 27-year-old Russian, an insider at an unnamed corporation and an alleged million-dollar payment offered to help trigger a ransomware extortion attack on the firm.
Prosecutors declined to name the target, but Musk was happy to oblige. According to the billionaire, the scheme took aim at the electric car company’s 1.9 million-square-foot factory in Sparks, Nev., which makes batteries for Tesla vehicles and energy storage units.
“This was a serious attack,” Musk tweeted Thursday night, responding to a Tesla blog post that detailed the brazen scheme.
Defendant Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov tried to recruit a fellow Russian speaker who worked at the plant, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada.
Reaching out to the unnamed worker via WhatsApp in July, Kriuchkov allegedly flew to the United
States with a Russian passport on a tourist visa and sought to entice the worker to betray Tesla.
Kriuchkov allegedly took the worker, who he’d he’d first met in 2016, on a road trip to Lake Tahoe before offering the person $1 million to plant malware on computer systems at “Victim Company A.” Kriuchkov floated the scheme at a Reno area bar on Aug. 3 after the two drank heavily until last call, the complaint says.
But the plant worker informed Tesla, which contacted the FBI and won the employee’s cooperation. In subsequent meetings monitored and recorded by federal agents, Kriuchkov laid out a scheme to have the worker infect Tesla computers with a program that would steal valuable data before scrambling plant systems with ransomware, according to the complaint.
The complaint says Kriuchkov told the Tesla worker that his organization had executed similar “special projects” on other companies on multiple occasions, with one victim supposedly surrendering a $4 million ransom payment.
The U.S. Attorney’s office for Nevada would not comment on whether Kriuchkov or any of his associates may have had ties to the Russian government. Kriuchkov was arrested Aug. 22 after driving from Reno to Los Angeles, where the FBI said he planned to fly out of the country. He appeared in federal court there Monday and was charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer, said Nevada U.S. Attorney Nicholas Trutanich.