Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Tesla's Sabotage / Espionage Wake-Up Call

Tesla has routed out a saboteur who changed code on internal products and exfiltrated data to outsiders, damaging company operations and possibly causing a fire, CEO Elon Musk told employees in an email...

Musk wrote in an email obtained by CNBC. “This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.”

While Musk said Tesla doesn't know the full extent of the employee's actions, “what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad,”...

“Trusted users always pose the highest risk as they have the means and only lack the motivation. In this instance, the motivation sounds personal, and that is quite often the case in corporate sabotage,” said Chris Morales, head of security analytics at Vectra. “It is not clear how this event was detected, but it sounds like it was discovered after the damage already occurred and there is still work to uncover the extent of that damage.”

Whether addressing a rogue insider or an outsider who has gained access to employee credentials, he said, “enterprises benefit from internal monitoring that can detect suspicious behavior in order to prevent damage,” more