Tesla has sued a former worker for allegedly stealing about 26,000 confidential files in his first week of work at the company, in accordance to a court filing.

The organization stated on Friday that within three days of being hired, software program engineer Alex Khatilov “brazenly stole thousands of trade secret that took Tesla years to develop” and transferred them to his private Dropbox, a cloud storage service.

Tesla stated that when confronted by Tesla’s security team, Khatilov claimed he had only transferred a couple of personal administrative documents. Khatilov informed the New York Post the files ended up in his Dropbox by mistake when he was trying to make a backup replica of a folder on his computer.

Tesla stated the files, which represented “200 man-years of work”, have been extraordinarily treasured by the company and when exposed to its competitors would give them a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation.

It said Khatilov’s was a member of an elite group of Tesla’s 40 employees out of 50,000 that had access to the intellectual property. No other employee was involved in the IP theft.

Tesla’s security group detected the file downloads on January 6, after Khatilov was employed on December 28, and confronted him by means of videocall as he was working from home, in accordance to the court filing.

Tesla said throughout this call, Khatilov delayed sharing his screen with the team, during which time “he hurriedly starts deleting records from his computer. However, investigators were still capable to view hundreds of private documents uploaded to his Dropbox, which Khatilov claimed he somehow forgot.

Khatilov, who informed the New York Post that he was unaware he was being sued till the newspaper called him on Friday, was fired the same day.

Medical documents belonging to truck drivers and rail workers may have been exposed following an alleged cyber-attack on an occupational healthcare provider in Virginia.

Data apparently belonging to employees of the United Parcel Service (UPS) and Norfolk Southern Railroad was published online to a leak website by the gang behind Conti ransomware. The cyber-criminals claimed to have obtained the data throughout a December cyber-attack on Taylor Made Diagnostics (TMD).

The HIPAA Journal reported that the leaked data includes full names, Social Security numbers, details of scientific examinations, drug and alcohol testing reports, and scans of driving licences.

With locations in Chesapeake and Newport News, TMD is an operator of occupational health clinics used by transportation agencies and government agencies. The company provides services inclusive of drug testing, CPR training, fit-for-duty evaluations, vaccinations, and respirator fit testing.

According to their website, TMD clients include the US military, the US Secret Service, the navy special warfare development group, BAE systems, Old Dominion University, the Social Security Administration, and the Virginia Department of Military Affairs.

While TMD has not verified the alleged attack, FreightWaves reported that amongst the more than 3,000 TMD files leaked on January 8 were multiple health records for employees at both UPS and Norfolk Southern dated as currently as December 2020.

In addition, the trucking news source spotted records belonging to personnel of US government agencies, defence contractors, and multiple smaller trucking companies.

Norfolk Southern Railroad, which employs nearly 25,000 humans in 22 states, said that it was investigating the veracity of the cyber criminal’s claims.

“The security of our employees’ data is a priority for Norfolk Southern and a requirement for our vendors,” Norfolk Southern spokesperson Jeff DeGraff wrote in an email to FreightWaves.

“Norfolk Southern is looking into the issue but has not issue any comment at this time.”

UPS, which employs 362,000 people in the US and an additional 82,000 internationally, said it is also looking into the possible data breach.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, in December alone, 37 US healthcare vendors reported hacking or unspecified information technology incidents that compromised nearly 1.5 million patients.