A Russian man has pleaded guilty in the U.S. to offering a Tesla employee $1 million to cripple the electric car company’s massive electric battery plant in Nevada with ransomware and steal company secrets for extortion, prosecutors and court records said. The Associated Press reports: In a case that cybersecurity experts called exceptional for the risks he took, Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Reno. 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 anti-virus software company Emsisoft. “It’s also possible that the criminals thought the gamble was worth it and decided to roll the dice,” Callow said. The FBI said the plot was stopped before any damage happened. Although Kriuchkov says the Russian government was aware of his case, prosecutors and the FBI have not alleged ties to the Kremlin.
“His guilty plea to conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer could have gotten him up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine,” the report says. “But he’s expected to face no more than 10 months under terms of his written plea agreement.”
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Source:: Slashdot