Former employee sued by Tesla says he was a whistleblower, alarmed by company practices and Elon Musk

Tesla sued a former employee Wednesday, accusing the man of hacking the automaker's computer systems and stealing company secrets, shedding light on what chief Elon Musk had suggested was the work of a secretive internal saboteur.

But the employee, Martin Tripp, told The Washington Post that he did not tamper with internal systems and is instead a whistleblower who spoke out after seeing "some really scary things" inside the company, including dangerously punctured batteries installed in cars.

Tesla attorneys wrote in their lawsuit that Tripp, a former technician at the company's Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada, wrote software to aid in an elaborate theft of confidential photos and video of Tesla's manufacturing systems. The firm's attorneys said Tripp worked at Tesla from October to last week, when company investigators confronted him with evidence.

Tripp, attorneys wrote, also gave journalists false information about the company, including claims that defective batteries had been used in Tesla's Model 3 sedans. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaking Wednesday night to The Post, Tripp confirmed that he provided information to Business Insider for a story the news website did earlier this month about the company's raw-material waste.

But Tripp, 40, said he did so because he was alarmed by what he learned while an employee, including what he claimed were hundreds of Model 3s that had punctured batteries. Tesla representatives have said they would not ship cars that have safety concerns.

Tripp said he did not hack into Tesla computers, saying, "I don't have the patience for coding." He also said he was not, as Tesla lawyers claimed, disgruntled about not getting a promotion. "That's their generic excuse," he said. "I could literally care less." read more »

Could an Equifax-sized data breach happen again?

Many global financial services organizations are targeted by sophisticated cyberattackers in an attempt to steal critical data and personally-identifiable information (PII), according to Vectra.

Vectra disclosed that cyberattackers build hidden tunnels to break into networks and steal information. These tunnels are used to remotely control an attack, known as command-and-control, and steal data, known as exfiltration, while remaining largely undetected.

Security breaches across multiple industries continue in an upward trajectory, and the financial services industry is no exception. But while financial services firms didn’t experience the same volume of breaches as other industries, they still face considerable risk as lucrative targets of cyberattackers in search of a windfall.

Researchers found the same type of attacker behaviors across the financial services industry as those that led to the 2017 Equifax data breach. The Equifax breach resulted in the theft of driver’s license numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information from 145.6 million consumers, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the breach occurred, it reportedly went undetected for 78 days.

From August 2017 through January 2018, Vectra monitored network traffic and collected metadata from more than 4.5 million devices and workloads from customer cloud, data center and enterprise environments. The analysis of this metadata provides a better understanding about attacker behaviors and trends as well as business risks, enabling Vectra customers to avoid catastrophic data breaches. read more » 

Major cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb halts trading after more than $31 million hack

One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges suspended operations Wednesday after announcing hackers stole more than $31 million worth of virtual currency, pushing down the value of some top names, including bitcoin.

The attack on the South Korea-based exchange, Bithumb, was smaller in value than some of the biggest hacks on cryptocurrencies. But it underscored the potential vulnerabilities for web-based trading and sent ripples across many cryptocurrency networks.

A statement from Bithumb gave no details on how hackers penetrated the system, which is among the top sites for cryptocurrency trading. Bithumb said its cryptocurrency holdings were shifted to an offline “cold wallet,” and any losses for traders would be covered.

Deposit and withdrawal services were halted “for the time being,” the exchange said. It did not say when they could resume. read more »