A massive Volkswagen data leak exposed the whereabouts of 460,000 EV drivers

A Volkswagen software subsidiary called Cariad suffered a massive data breach that exposed 800,000 electric car owners, according to a report by German edition A mirror online world. The leak allowed personal information to remain online for months, including traffic data and contact information.

This includes accurate location data for 460,000 vehicles manufactured by VW, Seat and Audi. According to reports, the information was accessed through Amazon’s cloud storage platform. There is a silver lining here. Cariad says that despite being available, no bad actors had access to the exposed data. The bona fide hacker association Chaos Computer Club (CCC) spotted the leak on November 26 and brought it to the company’s attention.

VW said in a statement reviewed by the German Press Agency DPA that the error has since been fixed so that the information is no longer available. The company also noted that the leak only concerned location and contact information, as passwords and payment information were not affected. He added that only selected vehicles registered for online services were initially at risk, saying “the data was accessed in a very complex, multi-step process”.

According to Volkswagen, the hacking group CCC was only able to access pseudonymised vehicle data, which does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about specific customers. This was done “only by bypassing several security mechanisms, which required a high level of expertise and a significant investment of time.”

In other words, affected customers don’t have to worry too much about their location data being harvested by dark web wells. The company has launched an investigation into the matter and will decide on further steps once it is complete.

Like modern vehicles get more and more onlinethis opens them up to countless new risks. It was last year when a viral TikTok challenge taught Hyundai users how to hack their vehiclesresulting in more than a dozen crashes and eight deaths.