An insider breached the personal data of 75,735 current and former Tesla employees.
Tesla knew about the breach the day it happened, on May 10, and began notifying affected employees Friday. It cited “insider wrongdoing” as the cause of the breach, which included Social Security numbers.
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“A foreign media outlet (named Handelsblatt) informed Tesla on May 10, 2023 that it had obtained Tesla confidential information,” the company wrote in its notice. “The investigation revealed that two former Tesla employees misappropriated the information in violation of Tesla’s IT security and data protection policies and shared it with the media outlet. The outlet has stated that it does not intend to publish the personal information, and in any event, is legally prohibited from using it inappropriately.”
Tesla confirmed there was no “evidence of misuse of the data in a manner that may cause harm.” Still, it offered 12 months of Experian’s IdentityWorks credit monitoring and identity theft service to those affected.
“Among other things, we identified and filed lawsuits against the two former employees,” Tesla said. “These lawsuits resulted in the seizure of the former employees’ electronic devices that were believed to have contained the Tesla information. Tesla also obtained court orders that prohibit the former employees from further use, access, or dissemination of the data, subject to criminal penalties.”
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A group of AutoPilot employees at Tesla’s Buffalo Gigafactory are currently attempting to unionize. Some of the union leaders were fired, which employees claimed was because of the attempted union, but the company claimed those were “false allegations.”
Last year, Tesla received 3.6 million job applications and boasted 128,000 employees, a global increase of 29,000.
