By now, most of you have surely read or heard about the Tesla employee who turned down a lot of money to help a hacker break into the company. Who wouldn’t want $1 million to plug in a USB drive? As a business owner, how confident are you that an employee wouldn’t take this deal?
This is a fantastic story, and I’m happy to see the integrity of this employee. Yeah, a million dollars is amazing but he was part of a great story and took down someone that could have cost his employer millions more.
This type of situation is extreme compared to most others we’ve seen. A lot of times it takes only $100 to convince a cleaning person or security guard to do this. Sometimes, just $50 can get an employee to open the door for an attacker so they can do it themselves.
And don’t forget about extortion. We’ve seen situations where a C-Level person was blackmailed into giving up a password to a system or plugging in a drive because an affair or some other secret was discovered.
This story proves that people are watching and doing a very good job of knowing their staff. Technology can help in these types of situations but training and integrity are the keys here. This employee was honest and saved Tesla millions of dollars in potential ransom, not to mention the bad publicity and potential loss of intellectual property.
I hope they rewarded him with the million dollars he was originally offered.