His recruitment scheme failed, the complaint says, when the employee instead reported Kriuchkov's offer to the company, which in turn alerted the FBI, leading the bureau to surveil Kriuchkov and arrest him not long after.
Over the first two days of August, he drove the staffer to Emerald Pools in Nevada and Lake Tahoe, picking up the tabs and declining to appear in photos, court documents say, possibly attempting to avoid leaving a trail of his travels. The next day, Kriuchkov took his Tesla contact to a Reno bar and made the offer: Half a million dollars in cash or bitcoin to install malware on Tesla's network, using either a USB drive or by opening an email's malicious attachment.Kriuchkov allegedly explained to the Tesla staffer that the group he worked with would then steal data from Tesla and hold it ransom, threatening to dump it publicly if the ransom wasn't paid.
Moreover, to distract Tesla's security staff during the ransomware installation, the gang would carry out a distributed denial of service attack, bombarding Tesla's servers with junk traffic.
In fact, Kriuchkov allegedly claimed that another insider they had used at a different company still hadn't been caught after three and a half years.
A couple of weeks after that initial contact, Kriuchkov allegedly told the Tesla staffer that the operation targeting Tesla had been put on hold due to the failure of another attempted score in progress. That insider had failed to successfully install the malware, Kriuchkov said, asking the Tesla insider to await further communications before he went ahead with his own malware installation.
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