Corporate Espionage?

TruckElectric

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This employee(Alex Khatilov)hasn't worked for Tesla for even a month and was caught stealing code.

Tesla is not open to all it's secrets as some believe based on an Elon Musk comment about open patents.


Did someone(or some company) pay Alex Khatilov to steal Tesla's secrets? Hmmmmm

Corporate espionage is alive and well.

"This isn’t the first time that Tesla has sued or accused ex-employees of trade theft. Tesla sued Guangzhi Cao for copying Autopilot source code to his personal accounts and devices in late 2018. That case is still ongoing."

More on this in Casgains Academy video on the subject:





Tesla sues former employee for allegedly stealing software code
PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 22 20219:08 PM ESTUPDATED FRI, JAN 22 20219:50 PM EST

  • According to a legal filing on Friday, Tesla is suing a former employee and software engineer named Alex Khatilov alleging trade secret theft and breach of contract.
  • This is one of a string of suits Tesla has filed against former employees alleging trade theft, some still ongoing.
  • The complaint filed by Tesla says the ex-employee uploaded code used in the company’s backend software system, WARP drive, to manage a wide range of business processes.
Tesla is suing a former employee and software engineer named Alex Khatilov, alleging trade secret theft and breach of contract.

In the complaint, the company accuses Khatilov of grabbing code and files from WARP Drive, a back-end software system that Tesla developed to automate a range of business processes involved in manufacturing and selling its cars. They also accuse him of deleting possible evidence when security teams confronted him.

Khatilov was hired to help Tesla’s Quality Assurance team create software that could automate tasks or business processes related to Environment, Health and Safety.

The complaint says he began working for Tesla on December 28, 2020, and almost immediately began uploading files and scripts (written in a programming language called Python) to his Dropbox account. Tesla confronted him about his alleged theft on January 6th.

The code is of concern to Tesla because it could reveal to competitors “which systems Tesla believes are important and valuable to automate and how to automate them – providing a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation,” the complaint says.

This isn’t the first time that Tesla has sued or accused ex-employees of trade theft. Tesla sued Guangzhi Cao for copying Autopilot source code to his personal accounts and devices in late 2018. That case is still ongoing.

The company also sued former employees who wound up at other electric and autonomous vehicle businesses, Rivian and Zoox, over alleged theft of intellectual property.


Tesla revealed in the new complaint on Friday that only 40 people of about 50,000 total employees work on the company’s Quality Assurance team that hired Khatilov. The company also says it has spent an estimated “200 man-years of work” to develop the code in question.
Khatilov told the New York Post on Friday that the software files ended up in his Dropbox by mistake. He was trying to make a backup copy of a folder on his computer, he told the newspaper, and unintentionally moved it to Dropbox. He was was not aware Tesla was suing him until the newspaper reached out to him about the matter.



The case is here:





SOURCE: CNBC
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Sirfun

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That's one way to get FIRED!!!! BTW corporate espionage is very real.
 
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TruckElectric

TruckElectric

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That's one way to get FIRED!!!! BTW corporate espionage is very real.
The guy hadn't been working a month for Tesla before he tried to steal their IP.

Someone is desperate for Tesla EV knowledge!
 
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TruckElectric

TruckElectric

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Mistake, huh?

-Crissa
He got caught rather quickly. Tesla has a very good security team. I wonder how many don't get caught? May depend on what they are stealing. Some secrets are guarded like Fort Knox! ?
 


Quicksilver

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This is an ongoing problem with all industries. The Chinese seem to be the most brazen of the bunch but other countries are on the bandwagon. My guess is that even the US practices industrial espionage on some scale. When I was stationed in Korea it was obvious that the Koreans had knocked off several types of trucks and construction equipment they had imported from other countries. Dawoo knocked off the Scania dump trucks to the point where you could not tell the difference unless you saw the logo.
 

Diehard

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He got caught rather quickly. Tesla has a very good security team. I wonder how many don't get caught? May depend on what they are stealing. Some secrets are guarded like Fort Knox! ?
If you see other EVs are infected with phantom braking, you know which piece of code was stolen and why it was not well guarded ;)
 
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flowerlandfilms

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...we'd get a sweet techno thriller out of it is we still had Michael Crichton...
 
 




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