75,000 Tesla Employees Were Affected By a Data Breach

(CTN News) – There have been reports that Tesla Employees has a data breach that affects more than 75,000 of its employees as a result of insider wrongdoing.

Tesla, the electric car maker owned by Elon Musk, said in a notice filed with Maine’s attorney general that an investigation had found that two former employees had leaked more than 75,000 individuals’ personal information to a foreign media outlet in violation of Maine law.

The investigation revealed that two former Tesla employees had misappropriated the information for their own use in violation of Tesla’s IT security and data protection policies and had shared it with a media outlet,” Steven Elentukh, Tesla Employees data privacy officer, wrote in a notice to the public.

A large number of these records contain personally identifying information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, employment-related records, and Social Security numbers belonging to 75,735 current and former employees of the company.

In a statement, Tesla said that two former employees had shared the information with the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

The publication assured Tesla that it wouldn’t publish the information and that it has a legal obligation not to use the information inappropriately, as stated in the notice.

Bloomberg reported in May that Tesla had been hit by a “massive” hack that exposed everything from employee personal information to complaints from customers about the way their cars were performing.

There were over 23,000 internal documents obtained by the publication dubbed the “Tesla Files,” containing more than 100 gigabytes of confidential data, dubbed the “Tesla Employees Files.”.

These documents contained information about Tesla’s employees, customer bank details, production secrets, and customer complaints about the company’s Self Full-Driving (FSD) capabilities.

There is also a possibility that Musk’s Social Security number was included in the leak according to Handelsblatt.

As a result of Tesla’s lawsuits against the employees who allegedly committed the data breach, the company had to seize the electronic devices of the employees who were suspected of committing the breach.

Moreover, Tesla managed to obtain court orders that prevent the former employees from using, accessing, or disseminating the data in the future, subject to criminal penalties if they do.

There was a report by Reuters in April that Tesla employees had shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars with other Tesla employees.

Several employees have been reported to have shared “invasive” images and videos recorded by car cameras between the years 2019 and 2022.

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