Tesla Motors Website, Social Media Hacked

During an otherwise quiet weekend for Tesla Motors they were hacked. The electric car company based out of California, saw their Twitter account, the Twitter account of Elon Musk, media relations email account and their website, teslamotors.com, hacked. The whole thing was over in 30-minutes, however, it certainly raises concerns for a company with the most connected vehicles on the planet.

Just before 5:00 p.m. eastern time on Saturday evening, the word spread of the hack involving Tesla Motors. That word came from the hackers who changed Tesla’s account name to #RIPPRGANG. The entire hack reeked of sophomoric tactics not some far-reaching hack by large group. The Twitter hack actually led some to believe that they could get a fee Tesla Motors vehicle. The name and number of a purported person in Oswego, IL was given and phone calls began to fly. Reportedly five phone calls per minute came in for Twitter user @RootWorx who asked for the calls to stop. The Tesla website itself showed a cheesy collage involving a model S and Microsoft Paint-level graphics work.

“Autism Squad” claimed responsibility for the hack on the Tesla Motors page.

The question is, how could this all happen? According to AutoBlog, Tesla released a statement about the hack. That statement read in part, “Our corporate network, cars and customer database remained secure throughout the incident. We have restored everything back to normal. We are working with AT&T, Network Solutions, and federal authorities to further investigate and take all necessary actions to make sure this never happens again.”

There were no officially reported issues with Tesla cars during the hack. However, there was a user who commented on a TechCrunch article who reported Internet issues in his Model S during the time when the hack took place, but it’s not confirmed.

The Tesla homepage and social media accounts are back to normal. However, this hack will only raise speculation about just how connected cars should be and if a more serious hack on an automaker could one day impair important vehicle systems. True, this hack did nothing to Tesla vehicles, but for Model S owners, seeing the homepage of your automaker hacked from your in-car screen likely didn’t inspire confidence in the automaker.

What do you think about this hack? Should it raise flags as to the security of Tesla motors vehicles? Finally … do you think that consumers should be concerned about hackers being able to manipulate Tesla vehicles?