Almost 800K electric cars’ data exposed by Cariad

Cariad, the automotive software firm of Volkswagen Group, had data from nearly 800,000 Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, and Seat electric vehicles inadvertently leaked by a misconfigured Amazon cloud storage, according to BleepingComputer.

Included in the exposed car details was geo-location information for 460,000 vehicles, which were accurate to within 10 centimeters for VW and Seat models, while Germany accounted for most of the impacted vehicles, reported German publication Spiegel, which investigated the unsecured database after major European ethical hacker group Chaos Computer Club learned of the issue from a whistleblower.

Immediate action has been taken to resolve the security issue following a report from the CCC, noted Cariad, which also emphasized that data from the internet-connected vehicles registered for online services had only been accessed by CCC hackers.

Moreover, Cariad said that CCC also had no means to access the cars that had their data exposed while noting the importance of vehicle data in optimizing and bolstering digital functionality.