Bloomberg News
Tesla Inc. in a lawsuit Wednesday accused a former employee of hacking into the auto maker’s computer system to steal company data and send it to an unnamed third party.
The Silicon Valley electric-car maker’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nevada, says the former employee, Martin Tripp, admitted to writing software to hack the company’s manufacturing operating software and transferring several gigabytes of data to “outside entities,” including dozens of confidential photographs and videos of the system. He also wrote a computer code to export Tesla data off its network, Tesla alleged in its suit.
A Tesla spokesman declined to comment further.
Tripp didn’t have an immediate comment.
Earlier this week, Chief Executive Elon Musk in a memo to employees cautioned them to be on the lookout for possible saboteurs, noting that an employee had been found conducting an “extensive and damaging sabotage” to the company’s operations and hacked into the company’s manufacturing operating system to export data.
Popular now on WSJ.com: