Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) is the latest company to get hacked for the purposes of cryptocurrency mining.
It was recently discovered that hackers were able to infiltrate a Tesla Amazon cloud account that wasn’t properly secured. The hackers got into the server and began to mine cryptocurrency through Tesla’s account.
The point of entry for the attack was through an unsecured administrative console for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source package that is used by companies, such as Tesla, to manage a large amount of cloud-based applications and resources.
Tesla’s Kubernetes page was not password protected, making it vulnerable to attack.
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How were the hackers able to get away with the attack for so long without being noticed? They hid the malware behind an IP address run through the security firm Cloudflare. Most likely, the hackers would have also lowered the CPU being used to mine for crypto so as to reduce their chances of being detected. In addition, the mining software was configured to use a non-standard port to access the internet and to connect to an unlisted or semi-public endpoint instead of well-known mining pools.
Cryptocurrency mining wasn’t the only thing achieved by the attack. The breach also exposed some non-public data of Tesla’s. This data included sensitive telemetry information that has to do with some of Tesla’s cars. However, a Tesla representative reassures that “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.”
As soon as Tesla became aware of the attack, the company was able to shut it down within hours of learning about it. However, it’s difficult to tell how long it took for the breach to become known, or how much crypto ended up being mined in the process.
Several other companies have experienced similar breaches – Gemalto, the world’s biggest SIM card maker, and Aviva, a multinational insurance company, both fell victim to the crypto hack as well, among other companies. These were also cloud-based hacks, so maybe Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) needs to take a closer look at its cloud services.
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Featured image: TheDigitalArtist
