A young Russian citizen and his co-conspirators came dangerously close at carrying out a major ransomware attack against Tesla. However, the FBI and the Tesla team stopped the attack just in time. Last week, the United States Federal Bureau Investigation unsealed a criminal complaint against a conspirator in a thwarted ransomware plot against Tesla’s electric carmaker. The FBI arrested a 27 year-old Russian citizen Pavel Kriuchkov in Los Angeles for conspiring the ransomware attack against Tesla.
Pavel tried to recruit a Tesla staffer for the nefarious project.
The arrested Russian citizen allegedly spent much of his month in the US attempting to recruit a Tesla staffer at the firm’s Gigafactory Nevada site to collude on a nefarious “special project.” The “special project” came with a lucrative incentive — a bribe of $500,000, later upped to $1 million. He made a small advance payment into the staffer’s Bitcoin wallet, installed using a Tor browser to evade detection. The staffer was asked to assist in the installation of a targeted malware attack against Tesla. It was a two-stage plot involving a distributed denial of service attack, followed by an exfiltration of sensitive company data.
Crypto scams continue to increase amid the pandemic.
Crypto-related scams around the world have significantly surged amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning saying scammers might be looking to unleash a surge in crypto-related scams. Several countries also reported a surge in crypto scams that included a spike in ransomware attacks, Ponzi schemes, and other different types of scams involving cryptocurrencies.
Several types of crypto scams have become very prevalent, including fake giveaways, sextortion, fake exchanges, fake ICO’s, bitcoin recovery, video scams, and Ponzi schemes, and the list goes on. Earlier, accounts of several famous people on Twitter were hacked to solicit bitcoins from their followers.
