Tag: preventative measures

Tesla’s Latest Trade Secret Theft Lawsuit

Enigma Forensics experts investigate, preserve and recovery data to prove or disprove Trade Secret Theft. We have assisted many clients in financially recovering what was stolen from them or to help clear their name. Are you interested in learning more about trade secret theft? Check out Tesla’s latest law suit against a former software engineer.

A large portion of our business is forensically recovering and preserving data that is vital in proving or disproving trade secret theft. Enigma Forensics experts love to follow Tesla! We love the look of their beautifully engineered electric cars and we’re very interested in Elon Musk, the controversial character behind the engineering. Who is now labeled the most wealthiest man in the world. Our interest was piqued when we heard about Tesla’s latest lawsuit and that prompted us to write this blog.

On January 22, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Alex Khatilov, a former software engineer over Trade Secret Theft and Breach of Contract. Tesla contends that within days after Khatilov started his position on December 28, 2019, he began stealing thousands of highly confidential software files from Tesla’s secured internal network, transferring them to his personal cloud storage account on Dropbox to which Tesla has no access or visibility.

How did Tesla discover this trade secret theft or misappropriation of data?

On January 6, Tesla’s information security personnel detected Khatilov’s unauthorized download of a complete set of all the automation scripts produce by the Quality Assurance Engineering team for WARP Drive over the last twelve years! He was confronted the next day via Microsoft video chat due to Khatilov working remotely because of COVID-19 restrictions. Khatilov claims he installed a Dropbox desktop application to his Tesla issued laptop to allow him to upload administrative files to his personal Dropbox. He swore over and over that he only transferred administrative documents and then when he finally shared his screen with Tesla investigators he could be seen deleting the Dropbox files while on video chat confirming he had willfully destroyed evidence.

Why all the fuss?

How important are these scripts? These scrips are unique to Tesla and run on WARP Drive, the backend software for much of Tesla’s business. These files consisted of “scripts” of proprietary software code that Tesla has spent years of engineering time to build. When executed, these scripts automate a broad range of functions throughout Tesla’s business and only a few select employees have access to these files. It gets better! This is the good part…Khatilov contends he forgot about downloading thousands of confidential files!

The reality of this trade secret theft or misappropriation of confidential data is that Tesla has no way of knowing whether Khatilov copied the scripts onto a thumb drive, a mobile device, or a cloud based storage or most importantly sent them to another individual. To understand more thoroughly how important these “scripts” or trade secrets are…They map out Tesla’s innovations! Making them extremely valuable and beneficial to any competitor.

What measures ensure against trade secret theft or misappropriation?

  1. Tesla limited the “scripts” access to only members of the Quality Assurance Engineering team in which Khatilov was one of forty employees to have access. The engineers that have access are not permitted to download scripts to the cloud or personal devices. This makes us wonder how Khatilov was able to download data!
  2. Only eight people within the Tesla company are approved to grant access to these scripts.
  3. Each engineer signs an extensive employment agreement and agrees to policy conditions of their employment with includes a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), that holds each employee to the strictest confidence of proprietary information, technical data, trade secrets so on and so forth.
  4. The NDA also states that upon termination or departure each employee will immediately return to the company all original document electronic or hard copies.
  5. Each physical facility has restricted access to only authorized personnel that are monitored by security guards and cameras.
  6. All visitors must check in with security, sign a NDA, submit to a photograph and be escorted by an employee.
  7. Tesla also used password-protected and firewall-protected networks and servers that are only accessible to current Tesla employee with the proper credentials.

Moral of this story is…

Even high level technology companies has issues with trade secret theft. If your company suspects something like this, immediately hire a computer forensics expert to electronically preserve data of soon to be departing or a departed employee that has already left the company. Enigma Forensics can analyze data that was misappropriated or stolen to help clients recover financial loss.

Chinese Suspects: Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi charged with trade secret theft

Preventative Measures: Medical Devices

What is a FIPS 140-2 and how does it play a role in medical devices? Are medical devices manufactured with security in mind? Experts Lee Neubecker and Keith Handler discuss medical device security.

What measures are in place to help protect medical devices from cyber compromise? President & CEO of Enigma Forensics, Lee Neubecker gained insight into the latest and greatest preventative measures being developed for medical devices. Lee sat down with the top engineer for Sterling Medical Devices, Keith Handler and explored technical measures applied to the manufacturing process of medical devices. Check out this video to learn all about the tech measures. You will be so much smarter if you do!

Part 3 of our 3-Part Series on Medical Devices

Part 3 of our 3-Part Series on Medical Devices

The video transcript of Preventative Measures: Medical Devices follows.

Lee Neubecker: Hi, I’m back on the show again with Keith Handler from Sterling Medical Devices. Keith, thanks for coming back.

Keith Handler: Hi Lee, thanks for having me.

LN: So in our 3rd segment on medical device security, we’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the hardware elements, how the software gets loaded onto medical devices and what things are in place to help protect medical devices from cyber compromises. So first, Keith, can we start off with telling everyone what FIPS 140-2 is and how that plays a role?

KH: Yeah, absolutely. FIPS is the Federal Information Processing Standard, 140-2 is the specific certification for encryption libraries. That certification means that those encryption libraries are proven to be usable and certified to be usable for federal systems and medical systems.

LN: Most hospitals require FIPS 140-2 for immediate devices if you’re transferring PHI, Patient Health Information. If you’re transferring that information to external storage, they want to make sure you’re using secure storage that meets federal information processing standards.

KH: Correct.

LN: So when you’re evaluating a device for security, what are some of the things that you do to help ensure that the firmware that’s stored on the chips is secure and safe?

KH: Well, an embedded device it’s a challenge, of course, you have limited space, limited capabilities typically, especially on lower power devices. If you’ve got the space and the ability, we can use hardware encryption chips, hard-circuits, those are usually the most reliable and the most performant. If not, there’s plenty of embedded libraries out there that are FIPS 140-2 certified. The main thing being that we never roll our own as far as encryption libs go, we use federally certified ones to ensure that we’re up to the current standards and encryption strength.

LN: Those standards change over time.

KH: Correct, yes.

LN: At one point and time, SHA-1 encryption used to be considered perfectly fine, but now with quantum computing, there’s been a rush to ditch SHA-1 and require SHA-2 as encryption library to help secure things.

KH: Yes, this brings up an important point actually. How do we keep things secure moving forward when new vulnerabilities are found, new attacks are found, libraries are cracked.

LN: Yeah so, what do hospitals and other healthcare providers need to be doing to ensure their devices stay secure once deployed?

KH: Well, hospital healthcare providers need to be making sure that they are up-to-date with the manufacture of all of their devices, that they are keeping apprised of any kind of recalls or anything like that. Manufacturers, the people that we typically deal with, product developers, their responsibility is to maintain a bill-of-materials, a cyber bill-of-materials; their libraries, their encryption circuits, make sure that they’re tracking the versions and things like that so that when a company has a vulnerability exposed, they can become aware and make updates and push them, software especially, as fast as possible.

LN: All right, so if an organization or a healthcare entity were to become compromised, have you been involved with supporting the client that underwent a cyber compromise?

KH: I have not, we’re usually in the earlier stages of developing the products prior to that occurring, and our products hopefully never get compromised.

LN: So I’d imagine though that if there’s a concern about the security of certain medical devices, that there’s a need to actually dump the firmware. Firmware is software stored on an embedded chip. But the firmware will persist after power-down, reboot to whatnot, but there is an ability to go and extract the firmware of the chip with the correct tools, such as a Bus Pirate, or other devices. And then what would you do to examine, if you had access to the firmware on a chip, how would you go about ensuring that that’s authentic?

KH: Well the first thing is if we’re going to push out firmware, things like that, you need to make sure that the device can know that it’s authentic. And we do things again, like digital signing, signature verification encrypting of that firmware package. That way we have a verification process in place to ensure that what we’ve got coming down is good.

LN: So that’s known as a hash.

KH: That’s part of it yes.

LN: So the hash value is the unique encrypted thumbprint generated by a hash algorithm and those hash values can be used to compare against the manufactures release version and what’s on the chip to determine, are they running the most recent up-to-date firmware, or are they running a older version or are the running something that’s rogue that is not known by the manufacturer.

KH: And that’s the real key, to make sure that what we’re running is what we expect it to be and not something that has been tampered with.

LN: How often are hospitals and IT staff actually auditing and checking their firmware?

KH: You know I’m not clear on that, but I would say almost certainly not enough.

LN: Yeah, so that’s one of the things that I know you’ve said earlier, that it’s important that all these entities using the devices, once they’re certified and deployed, there’s still a responsibility on the healthcare delivery organizations to make sure that they’re patching and updating those devices so that they keep the standards.

KH: Ideally. Nowadays, a lot more devices are connected, communicating out with central servers, and that gives them the advantage of being able to receive security updates, so it takes that middleman out, essentially, but that also opens up additional potential security holes that have to be considered and protected against.

LN: Yeah, and anything that comes to mind that you’re concerned about in regard to new threat factors?

KH: Well, you know, again, if I’m distributing firmware by handing it to you on a USB stick, you can be pretty certain that what I’m giving you is likely to be good. If I’m telling you download it from this site, you don’t know. For all you know, it could get tampered with in transit. So it raises a lot of additional risks.

LN: Do you think that there’s something to be said for going back to the old updates on CD, read-only media?

KH: Well, you know, information is what it is, and things mover faster nowadays, so I don’t know that it makes sense to move backward, it just means that we have to have more modern methods of protection.

LN: But thanks a bunch for being on this show. This is great stuff.

KH: You’re very welcome, and thanks for having me.

LN: It’s my pleasure.

View Part 1 of our 3-Part Series on Medical Devices

Medical Device Security Challenges

Part 2 of our 3-Part Series on Medical Devices

FDA Cybersecurity Regulations: Medical Devices

Other Related Articles

Computer Forensics in Medical Malpractice
Data Breach Response Experts
Forensic Imaging

Overview of the FDA’s Medical Device Regulations

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/device-advice-comprehensive-regulatory-assistance/overview-device-regulation

Sterling Medical Devices website

https://sterlingmedicaldevices.com/