Tesla Hackers Hijacked Amazon Cloud Account to Mine Cryptocurrency
Tesla Hackers Hijacked Amazon Cloud Account to Mine Cryptocurrency
Summary
My Thoughts
Cloud Computing is the industry standard for almost any Enterprise in this day and age. If any of you have ever worked with AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure then you are very familiar with how these attacks could occur.
For those of you unfamiliar, each of these cloud platforms just require an internet account and a username/password. From there, depending on the permissions of your account, you can launch servers. These servers, depending on their technical specifications can cost anywhere from a few cents a day to $100's of dollars an hour. Server instances that have a high amount of GPU throughput are always the most expensive, so if a hacker had access to an account that could create Server instance objects they could run up a significant bill relatively quickly.
As an industry expert in Cloud computing - I can say that this was almost certainly an inside job. Likely the Tesla organization has a password safe/shared account for their Cloud Computing accounts on AWS. Likely someone leaked this username/password to make a quick buck - and it would be impossible to trace.
Prevention
This attack could of been prevented. AWS, Google and Azure all have the ability to create individual accounts for every user that needs access to the platform. The permissions they can provide to each individual account can be very specific and locked down. All these platform's also support 2FA (2 Factor Authentication) which means that a hacker would not only need a leaked username/password but also a physical token. You can also set budgets that would send alarms if budgets were exceeded - this would catch a cryptomining server very quickly.
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I've done some research on all sorts of digital thefts in the past half decade, and inside jobs are common. They're also one of the toughest things to prevent. The article below says 3/4 of digital attacks are at least partially inside jobs. I'm sure you're right.
https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/17/11/p10792005/most-cyber-attacks-are-inside-jobs
This is a good one
Thank you.
Great work bro! It was great to have you in the team at Steemfest and thanks to @cryptoindex for helping out with the drone shots. Looking forward to the next event!