Russian tourist offered employee $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

The employee reported the offer to Tesla and later worked with the FBI in a sting that involved him covertly recording face-to-face meetings discussing the proposal.“The purpose of the conspiracy was to recruit an employee of a company to surreptitiously transmit malware provided by the coconspirators into the company’s computer system, exfiltrate data from the company’s network, and threaten to disclose the data online unless the company paid the coconspirators’ ransom demand,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint.Until Thursday afternoon, the identity of Company A was uncertain, although there was plenty of Twitter speculation—and several sourceless blog reports—that Tesla’s site in Nevada was the target. KRIUCHKOV stated each of these targeted companies had a person working at those companies who installed malware on behalf of the “group.” To ease CHS1’s concerns about getting caught, KRIUCHKOV claimed the oldest “project” the “group” had worked on took place three and a half years ago and the “group’s” co-optee still worked for the company. In fact, KRIUCHKOV claimed the group could attribute the attack to another person at Victim Company A, should there be “someone in mind CHS1 wants to teach a lesson.”During the meeting, CHS1 expressed how concerned and stressed CHS1 had been over the request. Flying into US jurisdiction to have malware manually installed on a company's network is absolutely insane.A chilling observation, from Craig Williams, director of outreach as Cisco’s security arm Talos Labs, was what might have happened had the plot succeeded.“This does bring into question the risk added if the system responsible for your self driving car comes under attacker control—due to malicious insider or otherwise,” he wrote.