Tesla sues its former employee for $1 million for data pilfering and going public

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has filed a case on Wednesday against a former ‘Process Engineer’ for alleging stealing secret data and making it public. The engineer in question is Martin Tripp who is reported to be preparing to file a counter-petition against the carmaker for installing damaged batteries in its Model 3 Electric Cars.

Martin Tripp who is now into trading business said that he was merely acting as a whistleblower as he wanted to disclose the murky business secrets of Tesla to the world.

Note- Early this week i.e. on Monday CEO Elon Musk sent an email to his employees warning them against indulging in malpractices of leaking secret information to media resources or to the company’s competitors. Now, the news is out that the car maker is going to sue the employee for stealing and transferring data to third parties and falsely leaking interpreted info to the media.

Reacting to the claims of Martin, Tesla reacted that it never plays with the safety of its car users and has denied all allegations put forward by its former employee.

In a statement released from Tesla’s spokesperson a few hours ago, it is revealed that Nevada based Tripp has admitted to Tesla Investigators that he wrote software that transferred data outside the company.

The statement also clearly specifies that Trip hacked the servers of the Tesla’s manufacturing unit and has transferred several gigabytes of data to outside entities- possibly Tesla’s competitors.
This includes photos and videos of Tesla’s manufacturing systems.

Furthermore, Tesla argues that it has proof that the hacking software was also being run on the systems of 3 more employees so that the data would be transferred even after he leaves the company.

On the other hand, Tripp admitted that he leaked some info to news resource Business Information which was running a story on Tesla’s malpractices being carried out while manufacturing electric cars. He also admitted that he doesn’t have the patience to do coding on computers.

Martin, however, rejected claims that he did so due to the frustration that he was never promoted.

Tesla claims that Martin was a ‘True’ Insider Threat to the company and so will have to face consequences as per his nefarious deeds.

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Naveen Goud
Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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