Russian tourist offers tesla employee 1 million dollars to cripple tesla with malware

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, CTR640 said:

Not sure if 1mil is a lot or not but the IT guy used his common sense and thought it's not worth it considering it's a matter of time before he'll get caught.

Or he gets a very nice monthly salary.

 

And why the hell does that terrourist wants to cripple Tesla? What will that piece of shit gain? There is a good chance the terrourist will lead all of the evidence to the Tesla employee some day.

 

Money is nice but risking important stuff is not worth it. It's very good the IT guy used his healthy common sense.

Well the assumption is there are several ways to get more than a million dollars gain out of that.  

1) The short sellers of tesla of which there were a lot of and some very very heavy ones are losing their shirts. Even a temporary hit to the price would allow them to cut their losses.

 

2) tesla has numerous competitors, and most of them are waaay behind technologically, so shooting one of the tesla technologies in the face could really help them.

 

3) It has been a blanket statement by Putin that anything at all that is bad for the US is good for russia.  He considers The current government to be bad, so he tries to keep it in power.  He considers the rise of white supremicists to be bad for America so he pushes that.  He likely thinks tesla is good for America so damaging it would be good too. 

[Tech_Dreamer]

Now that's a good faithful employee.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, Tech_Dreamer said:

Now that's a good faithful employee.

I concur.  He should be richly rewarded.  Some to him directly and some much more Generally So he gets to have helped people he works with. 

[Doqtori]

On 8/31/2020 at 11:50 PM, Teddy07 said:

Money upfront and I would have done it. Enough to retire somewhere in the world

But can you live comfortably with the fact that once the cars start crashing, you've put hundreds of people in danger, if not caused the death of some?

[Sauron]

On 8/31/2020 at 10:11 PM, spartaman64 said:

It could have been a really dangerous situation given how tesla can receive over the air updates and have self driving capabilities. 

If a single employee could bypass all software sanity checks as well as their colleagues and push malware through OTA then Tesla would have a serious problem, bribe or not.

On 9/1/2020 at 1:23 AM, Kisai said:

I can think of multiple scenarios, but the most likely one is espionage.

 

Short selling would be a lucrative way to blow up a company though.

 

1) install malware

2) tell investment client the company will have a very bad day on X date

3) investment client short sells the company on open

4) company has bad day, setting back company months

5) investment client buys back the shares shorted at a much lower price.

6) Also repeat on earnings.

 

Though if this was going to be a short seller, there are much easier targets to hit.

Weird that they would target Tesla for this when they depend on government incentives to make a profit rather than car sales...

On 8/31/2020 at 10:48 PM, Caroline said:

what's the point? the it guys would cut the internet access and restore the backups in less than an hour

Except 1) they would still have potentially dangerous cars on the road while they scramble to fix it, even assuming it gets reported immediately 2) the malware could theoretically cripple OTA to prevent said backups from being restored. Something like this must be caught before it's pushed.

[Bombastinator]

5 hours ago, Sauron said:

If a single employee could bypass all software sanity checks as well as their colleagues and push malware through OTA then Tesla would have a serious problem, bribe or not.

Weird that they would target Tesla for this when they depend on government incentives to make a profit rather than car sales...

Except 1) they would still have potentially dangerous cars on the road while they scramble to fix it, even assuming it gets reported immediately 2) the malware could theoretically cripple OTA to prevent said backups from being restored. Something like this must be caught before it's pushed.

re: malware

agreed

 

Re: incentives

I am unsure how much tesla depends on incentives currently.  My understanding was electric car incentives petered out on most models.  Incentives may have also been made less strong lately iirc.  I don’t know in what way or if that is even true though.  That incentives were a core price reducer has been true in the past is unarguable.  They do seem to come out with new models about the time that incentives Peter out.  How related the two are I don’t know.  Correlation is not causality.  Any type S or model 3 sales after the incentive petered out for those models wouldn’t apply.  

re: danger

agreed