Not even Elon Musk can stop a cyber attack from happening! Unbeknownst to Tesla, a crypto-mining malware had been using one of Tesla’s AWS cloud servers for computing power to mine on the popular Stratum bitcoin mining protocol. RedLock, the security firm that discovered Tesla’s vulnerability, stated that because Tesla’s server was open sourced and not protected by a password, the hackers were able to access the server and deploy their scripts to conduct their crypto-jacking operation, as well as potentially steal sensitive information from Tesla.
Although it’s difficult to determine how long the cybercriminals were exposing Tesla’s servers, this attack reinforces the importance of hacker insurance for businesses, regardless of size. Malware attacks have been increasingly more popular throughout the past years. So much so, that Juniper research predicted that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost 4x the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.