A flood of tweets and telephone calls inundated a computer repair shop, all flowing from promises of free electric vehicles tweeted from Tesla Motor's Twitter account.
Along with its Twitter account, Telsa website also fell into the hands of hackers. A group calling itself Ripprgang has taken responsibility for both of the hacks.
Late Saturday night, April 25, Tesla's Twitter account had been recovered. But the company's website was still redirecting to a website called ISIS.Camp.
It wasn't just Tesla Motors who had a rough Saturday. A computer repair shop in Illinois was brought into the incident, as the hackers, speaking from the hacked Twitter account, promised free cars to those who called a phone number listed in a tweet.
That tweet led to this:
Again, There is no free car, I did not hack Elon Musk or Tesla's Twitter account. A Finnish child is having fun at your (and my) expense.
— r000t (@rootworx) April 25, 2015
@GuyOthersome @elonmusk Someone doesn't like me and is trying to get me arrested. — r000t (@rootworx) April 25, 2015
If Elon Musk wanted to give away a car, he's got way better people to handle it than I.
— r000t (@rootworx) April 25, 2015
@mrcdbnzbiome @chasrmartin @TeslaMotors @chF060 If you robbed a bank, would you spray paint your name or someone else's? — r000t (@rootworx) April 25, 2015
It's unclear just how far reaching the Tesla Motors breaches go, but intrusions like those are becoming commonplace. Latest report from Verizon confirms what the world already knows: hacking and phishing attacks aren't slowing down.
Once a phishing campaign has been launched, it takes an average of a minute and 22 seconds before someone bites the bait and clicks on a malicious attachment embedded in an email.
"With users taking the bait this quickly, the hard reality is that you don't have time on your side when it comes to detecting and reacting to phishing events," the report states.
Breaches that follow the phishing attempts go an average of about 458 days before they're detected. There are other ways into an organization's cyber headquarters and hackers have been relying on all of them more and more.
