Volkswagen user data leaked
Cariad, Volkswagen's software development subsidiary, has unwittingly leaked sensitive user data for electric vehicles from Volkswagen, Audi, Seat and Skoda. The leak included email addresses, phone numbers, location details and car owners' data.
The German conglomerate is entering 2025 with a bump. Information on the data of thousands of customers, which included such things as geolocation, has leaked onto the Internet. According to German media reports, up to 800,000 VW customers may have been victims of the leak. Data for the location of some 460,000 vehicles were available on the Internet.
Among those affected were German politicians, businessmen and Hamburg police officers. Intelligence personnel were also allegedly affected by the incident. The data was said to have been available for several months on an unsecured platform in Amazon's cloud. The leak was discovered by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which reported the matter to German services.
“Only by bypassing several security mechanisms, which required a high level of expertise and a considerable investment of time, and by combining different data sets, was the CCC able to extract individual customer data from some users” – wrote in an excerpt from Volkswagen's official statement.
Volkswagen states the problem has been resolved and the data is now safe. The company assured that no passwords or payment data were leaked. It also maintains that the incident was the result of a complex, multi-stage attack that required advanced technical expertise. Nevertheless, the disclosure of the data points to weaknesses in the management of cloud-based systems.
Either way, the whole situation has raised questions and much doubt in Germany about the security of systems in modern cars. Similar problems have also affected other manufacturers, such as Toyota, which for a decade made customer data available online. Mozilla's 2023 study found that all of the car brands analyzed were collecting excessive amounts of personal data, often used inappropriately. The organization called modern vehicles a “privacy nightmare.”
