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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 29 2020, @04:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the insider-threats dept.

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

Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory was the target of a concerted plot to cripple the company's network with malware, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on Thursday afternoon.

The plan's outline was divulged on Tuesday in a criminal complaint that accused a Russian man of offering $1 million to the employee of a Nevada company, identified only as "Company A," in exchange for the employee infecting the company's network. 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.

Was the Russian working for Ivan Vanko?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @07:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @07:42PM (#1043914)
    Russian tanks and small arms* sell very well on the international markets, but the gas and oil pipelines** are their bread-and-butter. Their rocket program has a hard-earned reputation for reliability, but quality control has been suffering of late. What screwed over Roscosmos was actually the loss of the STS Columbia. Without a replacement manned rocked*3 US astronauts were being sent up on Russian rockets at extortionate*4 rates, and instead of investing the money into R&D they spent it all on hookers and blow*5. Now that the gravy train has been cut off they are insolvent, because heaven forbid they cut back on the graft. They used to export quite a few aircraft, but between the breakup of the Soviet Block and their inability to produce the newest generation of high efficiency jet engines*6, the market was largely taken over by Boeing and Airbus. The only other Russian export I can think of is mail order brides. *Made in eastern Ukraine, currently occupied by Russia. **South Ossetia and friends, also occupied territory. *3 Congress cut the research budget back when NASA needed to start work on it. *4 A ticket for one seat paid for the entire launch. *5 I assume the execs didn't just burn the money to heat their mansions. *6 The root problem with the 737 MAX was trying to fit the newest engines on a legacy airframe design that simply isn't compatible with them.