As a technical person, you need to keep copyright awareness in mind at all times.
Author | Su Mi
Exhibit | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
In early January this year, after hiring a software automation engineer, Tesla immediately dismissed it because Tesla discovered that the employee was suspected of stealing proprietary information about self-driving cars.
Now, Tesla is also suing the engineer.
Cause and effect
In fact, Tesla has always built a unique core competence in autonomous driving, battery management, user connectivity and other technologies, and has become a leader in the field of autonomous driving. Among them, in 2012, in the face of increasing production scale, Tesla self-developed and used a unified back-end WARP Drive ERP system based on management and user connections. A few years ago, Tesla Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan said in an interview with the media:
Elon Musk's (Tesla CEO) vision is to build a vertically integrated organization, so that the information flow between departments can be seamlessly communicated and collaborated. At the same time, our customer feedback and suggestion process has also formed a closed loop. Based on this, we can provide our customers with the best products, services and overall experience in the fastest way.
Since then, with the WARP Drive ERP system, Tesla has not only got rid of high product fees, but also built its own software and hardware ecosystem. The WARP Drive ERP system itself also contains many important back-end software of Tesla, which can automate many of Tesla's processes, such as from purchasing to manufacturing to inventory.
According to foreign media reports, on December 28, 2020, Tesla hired today’s defendant Alex Khatilov as a quality assurance engineer, mainly responsible for writing scripts, thereby using Python scripts to automate various business tasks and ultimately helping Tesla To automate the environmental health and safety system, and these scripts are running on the WARP Drive ERP system we mentioned above.
Between December 31, 2020 and January 4, 2021 and January 6, 2021, Tesla’s information security team detected 26,377 file transmission warnings in its network monitoring software, and these were from Alex Khatilov Account.
According to the lawsuit, within three days of his tenure, Khatilov stole thousands of files related to the automation of Tesla’s business processes from Tesla’s secure internal network and transferred them to his Dropbox (cloud storage software) account. .
At the same time, Tesla stated that these files contain "scripts" of proprietary software code that Tesla has spent years building. When these script files are running, they can automatically perform various functions of Tesla's entire business, including supply chain, inventory, product planning, etc.
Among Tesla's approximately 50,000 employees, only 40 engineers from the quality assurance engineering team have access to these files, and Khatilov, as a new member, also has access to these files.
When Tesla's information security team confirmed that the transferred files contained Tesla's proprietary information and this action violated company policy, Tesla's senior security intelligence investigator David Schertzer launched an investigation.
According to Schertzer’s testimony, that day he and other Tesla investigation team members conducted a communication investigation on Khatilov through a remote chat tool. When it was mentioned which files were copied to his Dropbox account, Khatilov initially insisted that these files were private, including Scanned passport and W-4 form (provided by the employer to the new employee to determine how much federal and state income tax will be deducted from the employee’s salary).
However, when investigator Schertzer asked Khatilov to share his screen, Schertzer stated that the other party delayed accepting the screen sharing request, and during this period, engineer Khatilov was quickly operating his computer.
In the end, when Khatilov accepted the shared screen, Schertzer said that the software engineer said that he had uninstalled the Dropbox application. Although the Dropbox application has been uninstalled, there will be some records in the cloud.
When investigators visited Khatilov’s Dropbox account, they made some new discoveries:
After getting some tips, the engineer allowed Tesla investigators to access his Dropbox account, where Tesla investigators discovered that the engineer was lying: In the engineer’s Dropbox, the investigators found thousands of Tesla confidential computer script.
However, the engineer then claimed that he somehow "forgot" the thousands of other documents he stole (almost certainly another lie).
However, according to the New York Post, Khatilov said in an earlier interview that he was unaware of the lawsuit. At the same time, when he backed up some administrative documents to a Dropbox account, he did not even know that 26,000 files were saved to In his personal online storage account. Khatilov insisted that this was a mistake, and Dropbox would automatically copy the Python files he installed during the onboarding process.
Currently, Khatilov has deleted all content in accordance with Tesla's instructions.
However, Tesla will still initiate a lawsuit, and the company explained the reason for suing the engineer in the lawsuit: "Tesla does not know whether he (Khatilov) has downloaded other files and whether he will be arrested a few days before being arrested. Files were copied from the Dropbox account to other places, or whether any files were sent to other people or businesses."
Golda Arulappan, senior manager of software quality assurance engineering at Tesla, stated in the court lawsuit: “These script files are very valuable to competitors. If other engineers access these script files, they will be able to perform a review of Tesla’s processes. Reverse engineering and spend a small amount of time to create a Tesla-like system."
How to avoid prison programming?
Coincidentally. This is not the first time Tesla has accused employees of illegally downloading or taking home Tesla trade secrets.
According to foreign media The Verge, in 2019, Tesla filed a lawsuit against a number of former employees and autonomous vehicle company Zoox for allegedly embezzling company trade secrets. Tesla stated that four former employees stole "proprietary information and trade secrets to help Zoox develop and operate the work required for warehousing, logistics and inventory control operations."
In addition, Tesla has also accused former employee Guangzhi Cao (Guangzhi Cao) of stealing source code related to the company's Autopilot driving assistance function before working for the Chinese electric car manufacturer Xiaopeng Motor Company. However, Guangzhi Cao, a former Tesla engineer, admitted in a document later submitted to the court that he uploaded a compressed file containing Autopilot source code to his iCloud when he was still working for Tesla at the end of 2018. Personal account, but denied stealing Tesla's sensitive information.
Now that this incident is still under further investigation, I believe that the truth will come to light one day.
However, as a technical person who is fighting on the front line in the industry, we need to maintain and strengthen the awareness of copyright protection at all times, avoid programming for prisons , and keep in mind that programmers complete the code during working hours to complete the company's arrangements. The copyright belongs to the company. , Be careful when copying .
reference:
https://electrek.co/2021/01/23/tesla-claims-software-engineer-stolen-critical-automated-software-warp-drive-system/