Russian pleads guilty to Tesla hacking and extortion attempt

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Russian pleads guilty to Tesla hacking and extortion attempt

 

 

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.

 

His end goal was to extort the company using the sensitive information stolen from Tesla's servers as leverage to convince the company to pay a ransom to avoid having the data leaked.

 

To convince the company's employee to act as an insider for his criminal gang, Kriuchkov told him that he would be paid $1,000,000 worth of bitcoins after the malware got deployed on the company's network, according to court documents.

Plans foiled after a series of other ransom attacks

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.

 

Kriuchkov explained that "the 'group' has performed these 'special projects' successfully on multiple occasions, and identified some of the targeted companies," according to the indictment.

 

The Tesla employee was also told that during their "special project" targeting Tesla's network, the criminals would launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to divert attention from the insider's attempt to deploy malware.

 

The employee would have also had to provide info on Tesla's network to help with the malware's development process.

 

However, the 27-year-old defendant's plans were thwarted by the FBI after the Tesla employee revealed Kriuchkov's attempts to recruit him via WhatsApp and in multiple face-to-face meetings where they discussed details of the conspiracy.

Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, later confirmed in a Twitter reply that Kriuchkov was indeed trying to recruit a Tesla employee to help with his extortion scheme.

 

Much appreciated. This was a serious attack.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2020

 

The defendant was arrested in August 2020 after he received a phone call from an FBI agent and hurried to leave the US to avoid getting caught.

 

He was indicted one month later and was charged with a count of conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer, facing a statutory maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

"The swift response of the company and the FBI prevented a major exfiltration of the victim company's data and stopped the extortion scheme at its inception," Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said.

"This case highlights the importance of companies coming forward to law enforcement, and the positive results when they do so."

 

According to the guilty plea, Kriuchkov agreed to a sentence within four to ten months of imprisonment and three years of supervised release.

 

 

Source: Russian pleads guilty to Tesla hacking and extortion attempt

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Tesla Ransomware Hacker Pleads Guilty; Swiss Hacktivist Charged for Fraud

 

 

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 (DoJ) on Thursday with conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft.

 

Till Kottmann (aka "deletescape" and "tillie crimew"), 21, of Lucerne, Switzerland, and his co-conspirators were accused of hacking dozens of companies and government agencies since 2019 by targeting their "git" and other source code repositories and posting the proprietary data of more than 100 entities on a website called git[.]rip, according to the indictment.

 

Kottmann is alleged to have cloned the source code and other confidential files containing hard-coded administrative credentials and access keys, using them to infiltrate the internal infrastructure of victims further and copy additional records and intellectual property. Additionally, the prosecutors said the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized the domain that was used to publish hacked data online.

 

The defendant's long list of victims includes Nissan, Intel, Mercedes-Benz, and many others, including the Verkada breach that happened earlier this month, thereby gaining access to more than 150,000 of the company's cameras installed in various locations ranging from Tesla warehouses to gyms, psychiatric hospitals, and health clinics.

 

Kottmann, who calls the hacktivist collective "Advanced Persistent Threat 69420," told Bloomberg the breach "exposes just how broadly we're being surveilled, and how little care is put into at least securing the platforms used to do so, pursuing nothing but profit," while attempting to justify their actions as part of a "fight for freedom of information and against intellectual property."

 

Then last Friday, Swiss authorities raided Kottmann's apartment and seized the hacker's electronic devices at the behest of U.S. authorities.

 

"Stealing credentials and data, and publishing source code and proprietary and sensitive information on the web is not protected speech — it is theft and fraud," said Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman. "These actions can increase vulnerabilities for everyone from large corporations to individual consumers. Wrapping oneself in an allegedly altruistic motive does not remove the criminal stench from such intrusion, theft, and fraud."

 

It's not immediately clear if U.S. prosecutors intend to extradite Kottmann, who still remains at large in Lucerne.

Russian National Pleads Guilty for Tesla Hacking Plot

 

In other related news, a Russian national pleaded guilty to offering a Tesla employee $1 million to plant ransomware at the electric carmaker's Gigafactory plant in Nevada.

 

According to court documents, the suspect, Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, 27, traveled to the U.S. in July on a tourist visa and made contact with a Russian-speaking employee in an attempt to install malware into the company's computer network with the goal of exfiltrating data and holding it for ransom.

 

But the extortion scheme fell apart after the employee in question alerted the company of the incident, which then involved the FBI into the matter.

 

"This was a serious attack," CEO Elon Musk said in an August 2020 tweet.

 

Kriuchkov, who previously denied any wrongdoing in September before a federal magistrate judge, on Thursday pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer intentionally. Kriuchkov is scheduled to be sentenced on May 10.

 

"This case highlights our office's commitment to protecting trade secrets and other confidential information belonging to U.S. businesses — which is becoming even more important each day as Nevada evolves into a center for technological innovation," said Acting U.S. Attorney Christopher Chiou for the District of Nevada.

 

"Along with our law enforcement partners, we will continue to prioritize stopping cybercriminals from harming American companies and consumers."

 

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