Hackers hijacked Tesla’s cloud to mine cryptocurrency

And you thought Elon Musk’s team is brilliant.

Looks like cryptojackers are not going to spare anyone. After disclosure of govt websites of UK and US being used by hackers to mine cryptocurrency and even YouTube ads made vulnerable to cryptojacking, now a new report indicates that electric vehicle maker, Tesla has reportedly fallen victim to a cryptocurrency mining malware attack.

Recently, the cybersecurity software firm RedLock has reported that hackers had exploited an insecure Kubernetes console, which they used to access and siphon computer processing power from Tesla’s cloud environment in order to mine cryptocurrencies. The team at RedLock claims that it discovered the flaw and reported the vulnerability to Tesla several months ago, but the company didn’t bothered to look into this.

The researchers discovered the breach last month while searching for which organization left credentials for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account open to the public internet. Later, it was revealed that the owner of that account was none other than Tesla. Meanwhile, Tesla claims that no customer data was impacted by the breach. According to a company’s official statement,

“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.”

So in nutshell, it turns out some hackers these days are more interested in stealing power from servers to mine cryptocurrency rather than abusing important data. As they have done in the case of Tesla, where a poorly secured cloud computing setup let hackers right in it.

As the cryptocurrencies have gone mainstream, many crypto mining firms are thinking of new tools to mine digital currency. Cryptojacking is a new malware issue that has gradually become a widespread problem. Crypto miners insert a code of JavaScript into websites and advertisements that use CPU’s power to mine cryptocurrency for them. The trend is likely to continue, as successful attacks can help criminals earn a significant amount of money.