Tesla has become the latest victim of cryptojacking. The company's servers were infected with malware that mines cryptocurrencies for criminals.
Hackers gained access to one of Tesla's Amazon cloud accounts and used it to run currency-mining software, researchers at security firm RedLock said. The case resembles earlier attacks on Aviva, a British multinational insurance company, and Gemalto, the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards.
“A tool called Mimikatz is used to pull credentials from a computer’s memory to infect other computers on the network. The malware then uses the infected computers’ compute to mine a cryptocurrency called monero quietly in the background,” RedLock wrote on its blog.
Monero is the 12th-largest cryptocurrency, and has a market capitalization of almost $5 billion. The cryptocurrency boasts greater anonymity than other digital money, and thus is very popular in cyberjacking.
RedLock said the Tesla breach also exposed some non-public data, including sensitive telemetry information related to Tesla cars. The company said it reported the hack to the automaker, and the virus was quickly disinfected.
"We maintain a bug-bounty program to encourage this type of research, and we addressed this vulnerability within hours of learning about it. The impact seems to be limited to internally used engineering test cars only, and our initial investigation found no indication that customer privacy or vehicle safety or security was compromised in any way," Tesla said.
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