It was a rough Saturday for the IT department at Tesla: both their Twitter account and website had been hacked. It also appeared that the company’s CEO Elon Musk had his personal Twitter account also hacked for a short time.
The first signs of the hacking appear around 2 p.m. Pacific time when a tweet from Tesla’s account announced it was under the attackers’ control, changing the name to #RIPPRGANG from Tesla Motors.
Several minutes later, the hacked account said it would promise free Teslas to people who followed certain accounts or to people who called a particular number. A quick Internet search shows the number to belong to an Illinois computer repair shop, and was tweeted out to overwhelm the shop owner.
About the same time, the website had been edited to note it was also hacked by the same folks. The website was taken offline at 2:15 p.m. but has since returned with the hacked pages several times. The Twitter account for Tesla was still hacked until around 2:45 p.m. The company’s website is still offline.
High profile Twitter accounts – like Tesla – are highly susceptible to being hacked. Many of the world’s most followed accounts have been a victim. For instance, Taylor Swift’s account was hacked several weeks ago. Although the real issue about the hijacking of both its website and Twitter account is that there is a lapse is the company’s security.
It’s not known if the hack blew the security of Tesla servers or if the hack is due to DNS/domain redirection. Tesla has not yet commented.
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