Musk Confirms Bitcoin Ransomware Attack On Tesla Gigafactory

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Employee loyalty was key for Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, after a criminal tried to bribe one of his employees into accepting millions in Bitcoin to hack into the company’s mainframe. The employee refused and instead alerted the FBI. Meanwhile Musk was informed just as he was about to show off his latest brain hacking device.

2020 Twitter Bitcoin scam

Just as with the infamous 2020 Twitter Bitcoin scam, where youngsters (remember 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark) bribed a Twitter employee to get access to celebrity accounts for a few hours, the modus operandi of this latest criminal proved quite easy.

#Tesla: malware paid in #Bitcoinhttps://t.co/B9I7ZetEsw pic.twitter.com/IeTbvfHh5N

— John Morgan (@johnmorganFL) August 28, 2020

The FBI stated in a press release that it had arrested a 27-year-old Russian citizen named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov.

Much appreciated. This was a serious attack.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2020

In their document they explained that the young Russian had attempted to steal Tesla’s corporate data by offering a million-dollar bribe in Bitcoin to a Tesla Gigafactory employee. In return for the money, the employee was supposed to install malware on Tesla’s servers. The employee and the criminal met several times, but what the latter didn’t know is that the Tesla employee had alerted both his bosses and the FBI after the first encounter already.

Bitcoin is incredibly popular in California, just as Tesla is. It is therefore no surprise that more and more Bitcoin ransomware attacks will be offered to Silicon Valley tech companies.

Pig brain hack

Musk confirmed the story in a tweet and congratulated the Nevada employee, just as he was about to set off for a company presentation of his latest venture called Neuralink, which aims to connect the human brain to computers.

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The technology is called Brain Hacking and has been incredibly popular on internet chatrooms. Yesterday Musk showed how it works on a pig called Gertrude and immediately explained that these are simply baby steps in the long process of one day hoping to upgrade humans itself.