Russian man charged with plotting cyberattack on Tesla pleads guilty in US
- Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov pleaded guilty to offering a Tesla employee US$1 million to get malware into the electric car maker’s plant in Nevada
- The FBI said the worker informed the company and cooperated with the agency, and the plot was stopped before any damage happened
In a case that cybersecurity experts called exceptional for the risks he took, Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov pleaded guilty on Thursday in US District Court in Reno. His court-appointed federal public defender, Chris Frey, declined on Friday to comment.
Prosecutors alleged that Kriuchkov acted on behalf of co-conspirators abroad and attempted to use face-to-face bribery to recruit an insider to physically plant ransomware, which scrambles data on targeted networks and can only be unlocked with a software key provided by the attackers. Typically, ransomware gangs operating from safe havens hack into victim networks over the internet and download data before activating the ransomware.
“The fact that such a risk was taken could, perhaps, suggest that this was an intelligence operation aimed at obtaining information rather than an extortion operation aimed at obtaining money,” said Brett Callow, a cybersecurity analyst at antivirus software company Emsisoft.
“It’s also possible that the criminals thought the gamble was worth it and decided to roll the dice,” Callow said.
Charles Carmakal, chief technical officer at cybersecurity firm FireEye, agreed. “You could have potentially done it from thousands of miles away without risking any asset,” he said.