Tesla faces cryptojacking in the Amazon Web Services cloud

While the Tesla Roadster that belonged to Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, goes to Mars, a destination located more than 400 million kilometers, at an estimated speed of 11 kilometers per second, after the impressive takeoff on board the SpaceX Falcon Heavy on February 6 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, here on Earth Tesla is news again.

Researchers from cloud control and defense company Red Lock published their findings on Tuesday that part of Tesla's infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was running mining malware, in a powerful crypto-trafficking operation.

The researchers revealed the infection to Tesla in January, and the company moved quickly to decontaminate and block its cloud platform in a single day. The automaker's initial investigation indicates that the data exposure was minimal, but the incident underscores the ways in which cryptojacking can pose a major security threat.

Red Lock discovered the intrusion while scanning the Internet in search of misconfigured cloud servers, found an open server, and investigating a little more they came across a Kubernetes executing covert mining operations, or cryptojacking.

Apparently the hackers followed the same route, finding this Kubernetes console unprotected (without a password) and containing access credentials to wider sectors of the Tesla cloud, which allowed them to deploy extraction scripts, based on the popular Stratum protocol for Bitcoin mining.

Researchers at the Red Lock company did not disclose how much could have been mined, or if there was damage to Tesla's data, although a spokesman for the latter said that "the risk was minimal", since they acted quickly, being able to resolve the contingency in just hours.

Since the beginning of 2017 the term "cryptojacking" has been used to label the (bad) "practice" of using the computing power of foreign systems to mine cryptocurrencies, of course, without the knowledge and / or consent of the owner or user.

Even though cryptojacking seems not to be aimed at the theft, damage, or hijacking of digital wallets, and, consequently, of the assets deposited there (in which case the term would fit perfectly), it continues to be used more and more in the event review like the one we just told.

Should end users worry? Partly yes. Any unauthorized access to your devices (laptop, tablet, smartphone) is a potential threat, but cryptojacking seems to point, logically, to high-performance platforms, such as clusters of servers hosted in cloud services, Microsoft Azure being, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace among the most named

In any case, take your precautions. If someone is going to make money with their computing power make sure it is you.