Electric carmaker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has been targeted by hackers.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla’s factory in Nevada was the target of a "serious cybersecurity attack," confirming a media report that claimed an employee of the company helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation stop the attack.
Tesla was the unnamed company in a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday about a Russian national's arrest in connection with a planned attack on an unidentified company, said Musk.
The Justice Department said that Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, 27, a Russian national, was arrested and charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer by trying to recruit a Tesla employee to introduce malware into the automaker’s system.
The malware was aimed at extracting data from the network and then hitting the company with ransomware. According to the Justice Department, Kriuchkov had promised the Tesla employee $1 million upon introducing the malware into Tesla’s computer system.
But the employee alerted the FBI, who successfully stopped the attack.
