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VW scandal: 800,000 electric cars affected by data leak – what now?
VW is being criticized for a massive data leak involving 800,000 electric cars. Location data and contact information were publicly viewable for months.
VW scandal: 800,000 electric cars affected by data leak – what now?
Another scandal is shaking the Volkswagen Group: around 800,000 electric vehicles are affected by a serious data breach that went undetected for months. How the mirror reported, sensitive vehicle data, including precise location data and personal information of 460,000 vehicle owners, was accessible to anyone via Amazon cloud storage. Not only VW is affected, but also the Seat, Audi and Skoda brands, which further increases the scope of the incident.
The scandal was first uncovered by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which alerted VW Group to the security flaw on November 26th. According to VW, it was a “misconfiguration” of the software that allowed the data to be accessible unprotected on the Internet for months. The corporate spiral continues to turn, because in Austria around 20,000 vehicle data were exposed to public access, while in Germany 300,000 customers were affected merkurn.de.
No evidence of abuse
Because, according to Volkswagen, no passwords or payment details were disclosed, those responsible see no need for action for affected customers. However, the question of data protection and the security of sensitive information remains. Although VW emphasizes that only pseudonymized data was available and did not allow any conclusions to be drawn about individual people, experts are concerned about the extensive security gaps that facilitate such data leaks.
The group has now revised the affected systems, but remains criticized for taking better care of the secure handling of customer data. The incident is also a significant burden on brand trust and could damage the company's image in the long term.