BOSTON – In a tweet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk solved a mystery involving a 27-year-old Russian, a limited corporate informant and an alleged $1 million payment filed to cause a ransomware extortion attack on the company.
Prosecutors refused to call the target, but Musk was content to do so. According to the billionaire, the program targeted the 1.9 million square foot power plant of the electric car company in Sparks, Nevada, which manufactures Tesla car batteries and electric garage units.
“It’s a serious attack,” Musk tweeted Thursday night, in reaction to a Tesla blog post detailing the braised plan.
Defendant Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov attempted to recruit a Russian colleague working at the factory, according to a criminal filed at the U.S. District Court in Nevada.
By contacting the anonymous employee via WhatsApp in July, Kriuchkov allegedly flew to the United States on a Russian passport and a tourist visa and tried to incite the employee to betray Tesla. Kriuchkov allegedly took the employee, whom he first met in 2016, in a car to Lake Tahoe before providing the user with $1 million to install malware on the PC systems of the “Victim Company A”. Kriuchkov presented the show at a bar in Reno’s domain on August 3 after the two drank heavily until the last call, according to the complaint.
But the factory employee informed Tesla, who contacted the FBI and received the employee’s cooperation. At subsequent meetings monitored and recorded through federal agents, Kriuchkov presented a plan for the employee to infect Tesla computers with a program that would use valuable knowledge before encoding plant systems with ransomware, according to the complaint.
Kriuchkov quoted as saying that the internal paintings would be camouflaged by a denial-of-service attack distributed on factory computers from the outside. These attacks overwhelm servers with unwanted traffic. If Tesla didn’t pay, the stolen knowledge would be emptied on the open Internet.
The complaint claims Kriuchkov told the Tesla employee that his organization had carried out similar “special projects” at other corporations on several occasions, with a victim allegedly paying a ransom of $4 million. According to the complaint, Kriuchkov added that his organization was a complicated encryption that would mask the involvement of the Tesla employee and disputed that a hacker in his organization was a high-level employee of a government bank in Russia.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Nevada did not comment on whether Kriuchkov or any of its affiliates may have any ties to the Russian government. There is nothing in the offender’s complaint that implies that his motives were not economic.
Tesla is a lucrative target. He leads in the United States in sales of electric vehicles and hackers may have received valuable data from battery chemistry to production techniques and prices. Tesla said the plant had reduced mobile battery prices through state-of-the-art production.
Kriuchkov was arrested on August 22 after driving from Reno to Los Angeles, where the FBI announced plans to leave the country. He made the impression in federal court on Monday and was charged with conspiracy to deliberately damage a computer, Nevada federal prosecutor Nicholas Trutanich said. A conviction can result in a five-year penalty sentence and a $250,000 fine. The court records did not promptly imply the call of a lawyer who can speak on Kriuchkov’s behalf.
It is not transparent in documents if the cash has replaced the hands. The criminal complaint and an affidavit from the fbi special agent Michael Hughes’s investigation describe a lot of haggling about whether the anonymous Tesla employee would get a portion of his promised ransom in advance.
Tesla did not respond to an email requesting a comment.
Other alleged co-conspirators are known in nicknames such as Kisa and Pasha; a user is known as Sasha Skarobogatov.
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AP writer Auto Tom Krisher contributed from Saline, Michigan.
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