Last week, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) filed a criminal complaint against a conspirator in a plot that opposes the thwarted ransomware opposing automaker Tesla.
On August 22, the Office arrested Pavel Kriuchkov, a 27-year-old Russian citizen in Los Angeles, who allegedly spent much of his month in the United States trying to recruit a Tesla worker at the company’s Gigafactory Nevada site to agree on a notorious “special project.”
This “special project” was accompanied by a lucrative incentive: a $500,000 bribe, which was then over $1 million. A small advance was made in the staff’s Bitcoin wallet (BTC), a Tor browser was installed to evade detection.
In exchange for the bribe, the staff member invited to help set up a malware attack targeting Tesla, a two-stage plot involving a distributed denial-of-service attack, followed by an exfiltration of sensitive corporate data.
The plan to ask for a tesla bailout at risk of public disclosure of the information. Kriuchkov’s conspirators had their eye on a $4 million ransom.
The challenge is that shortly after Kriuchkov’s first meeting with the staff member, who remains anonymous, the staff member had already alerted Tesla, who in turn informed the FBI.
A series of August meetings between Kriuchov and the member were physically monitored and heard through FBI agents. They accumulated data on the operation and other past exploits while the arrangements for the cyberattack were being carried out.
One of the conspirators was, according to Kriuchkov’s communications with the painter, a hacker specializing in encryption, who painted as a high-level painter of a government bank in Russia.
Kriuchkov himself obviously had no clear technical facets of the planned attack and was paid $250,000 for his recruitment efforts.
In an initial meeting, Kriuchkov, the staff member and two of his friends went on vacation to Lake Tahoe in California. Kriuchkov insisted on paying the bill for the organization’s expenses, however, he has avoided posing on the organization’s photos, insisting that he may simply “remember the good look of the sunset” without memory.
On August 21, Kriuchov informed staff that the attack was postponed for a later date and that it would leave Nevada the next day. After his arrest in Los Angeles on August 22, he is recently on remand.
Although Tesla is not explicitly mentioned in the FBI’s criminal complaint, the Tesla Teslarati news site showed that the company was the target. CEO Elon Musk stated the assignment in a tweet:
Very appreciated. It’s a serious attack.