Tesla denies Verkada hack on China factory

Elon Musk’s Tesla has denied the claims of a hacker group which says it spied on the car company’s Shanghai operations.

Tesla on Wednesday pushed back on hackers’ claims that its Chinese factory had been swept up in a massive surveillance camera breach.

The electric car maker was reportedly one of several companies hit in Monday’s cyber attack against Verkada, a Silicon Valley company that sells web-operated security-camera systems.

The hackers provided recordings to news outlets purporting to show footage from inside Tesla’s car factory in Shanghai and one of its California showrooms.

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A Tesla Model 3 moves off an assembly line during a ceremony at the Shanghai Gigafactory. Picture: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News

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But Tesla’s China branch told Reuters that the breach only affected one of its supplier’s production facilities in the Henan province west of Shanghai.

Neither the Shanghai factory nor Tesla’s showrooms there were infiltrated by the hack, the Elon Musk-led company said. Tesla added that the breach of the supplier’s plant did not pose a security risk and that the cameras there had been stopped from connecting to the internet.

The Shanghai “Gigafactory” that Tesla opened in late 2019 plays an increasingly important role in the automaker’s business. The factory produces Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs that are sold locally in China, which accounted for about a fifth of Tesla’s sales last year.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla company is an attractive target for hackers. Picture: Odd Andersen/AFP

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The Verkada hackers claimed they had accessed 222 cameras in Tesla’s factories and warehouses along with feeds from software firm Cloudflare, hospitals, jails and even Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, according to Bloomberg News.

Tillie Kottmann, a Swiss software developer who was part of the hacking group, told Reuters that Verkada cut off the infiltrators’ access hours before the breach was first reported on Tuesday.

“Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement,” Verkada said on Tuesday.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission