Ali Hasan
The world is a pretty amazing place and just when we thought 2020 is over and we won’t have any further bad news, there’s some bad news regarding Tesla. Elon Musk has the reputation of being in news irrespective of the reason. This is the same case for his company Tesla.
Both Musk and Tesla somehow make it to news each and every damn day of our lives. This time Tesla claims that a software engineer has stolen confidential files just 3 days into his job at Tesla.
During his 2-week employment ending Jan. 6, Alex Khatilov stole more than 6,000 scripts, or files of code, that automate a broad range of business functions. Tesla argues in its trade-secret theft complaint. Tesla convinced U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that the threat posed is serious enough that she granted a restraining order Friday requiring Khatilov to immediately preserve and return all files, records and emails to the company and appear before her, remotely, on Feb. 4.
Tesla might be at Risk of Losing Critical Data
Alex Khatilov was fired after the incident and his 2-week stint at Tesla ended on January 6. Tesla alleges that Khatilov lied about the theft and attempted to delete evidence, Bloomberg reported. However, Khatilov claims he showed the company the information in his Dropbox account and deleted it at their request.
“The scripts are extremely valuable to Tesla, and they would be to a competitor,” the company was quoted as saying by the news service. “Access to these scripts would enable engineers at other companies to reverse engineer Tesla’s processes to create a similar system in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the expense” the company said.
Khatilov said when he joined Tesla on December 28; he received a document that had information for new employees, which he transferred to his Dropbox account so that he could access it on his personal computer. “Nobody told me using Dropbox is prohibited” Khatilov was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.
“I don’t know why they claim its sensitive information, I didn’t have access to any sensitive information” he added. Khatilov said he had not shared the files with anyone or sent them anywhere.
Tesla wrote in their official lawsuit – “Tesla hired Defendant as a software automation engineer on December 28, 2020. Within three days, he began stealing thousands of highly confidential software files from Tesla’s secure internal network, transferring them to his personal cloud storage account on Dropbox, to which Tesla has no access or visibility. The files consist of “scripts” of proprietary software code that Tesla has spent years of engineering time to build. These scripts, when executed, automate a broad range of functions throughout Tesla’s business. Only a select few Tesla employees even have access to these files; and as a member of that group, Defendant took advantage of that access to downloaded files unrelated to his job.”
The case in is courts and we will update you on this matter as soon as a decision is made. Stay tuned folks.
