Volkswagen leaks personal data of 800,000 EV customers
As car technology improves in the digital age, so do security risks. Recently, the personal data of 800,000 customers of German carmaker Volkswagen’s electric vehicles (EVs) was leaked.
According to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel, data from Volkswagen’s software development company Cariad, which was supposed to be stored in Amazon cloud storage, has been exposed for months. The data included information on cars from the Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda brands.
The leaked data included the location of the vehicle, when it was turned on and off, and more worryingly, the data of German politicians, businessmen, the Hamburg police force’s fleet of EV vehicles, and intelligence agency employees are also suspected of being leaked.
The flaw was attributed to a technical setup weakness. The hacker association Chaos Computer Club (CCC) first noticed the issue and alerted the German federal cabinet and police through an anonymous hacker. Volkswagen and Cariad were given 30 days to fix the problem.
Of the 800,000 vehicles leaked, the location data for 460,000 Volkswagen and Seat vehicles was accurate to within 10 centimeters, while for Audi and Skoda vehicles it was accurate to within 10 kilometers.
Volkswagen claims that it has fixed the error and that the data is no longer at risk of being leaked. No passwords or payment data were leaked. The company said that only information about vehicles registered for online services was leaked.
