Tesla’s Online Presence Hijacked

The website and Twitter account of the e-car maker were hacked, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk briefly lost control of his personal Twitter account.

The first sign of a breach was a tweet from the account that declared it was now under the control of its attackers, and the account’s name was changed from “Tesla Motors” to “#RIPPRGANG”.

“A few minutes later, the account began promising free Teslas to those who followed certain accounts or to those who called a certain phone number. A quick search suggests that the number belongs to a computer repair shop in Illinois, and was presumably tweeted out to flood the number’s owner with calls,” TechCrunch reports.

Around the same time, Tesla’s website was redesigned to declare that it, too, had been taken over by hackers.

Within about 20 minutes, “the site had been taken offline — but in the hours since, it’s returned with the hijacked page multiple times,” according to TechCrunch.

It’s unclear if the hack penetrated Tesla’s own servers, or if the site hijacking was caused by something like a compromise at the company maintaining the web domain.

“Visitors were automatically redirected to a website with ‘ISIS’ in its URL, blaring an expletive-laden ranting video, and a picture of a man resembling Osama Bin Laden behind the wheel of a Tesla,” CBS reports. The words “Hacked by Autismsquad” also were inserted on the page.