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.
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