A massive Volkswagen data leak has revealed the locations of 460,000 electric car drivers

A Volkswagen software company called Cariad experienced a massive data leak that left 800,000 electric vehicle owners at risk, according to reports from Volkswagen. German publishing SPIEGEL NETSWILT. The leak allowed personal information to be left online for several months, including movement data and contact information.

This included precise location data for 460,000 cars produced by Volkswagen, Seat and Audi. According to reports, the information can be accessed via Amazon’s cloud storage platform. There is a silver lining here. Despite its availability, no bad actors were able to access the exposed data, Cariad says. The good faith hacking society Chaos Computer Club (CCC) discovered the leak on November 26 and brought it to the company’s attention.

Volkswagen said in a statement Reviewed by the German News Agency Data Protection Department The error has since been corrected, so that the information is no longer accessible. In addition, the company indicated that the leak only related to the website and contact information, as passwords and payment data were not affected. She added that only selected vehicles registered for online services were initially at risk, noting that “the data was accessed in a very complex, multi-stage process.”

According to Volkswagen, the CCC hacker group only had access to pseudonymous vehicle data which did not allow any conclusions to be drawn regarding specific customers. This is done only by bypassing several security mechanisms, which requires a high level of expertise and a significant investment of time.

In other words, affected customers shouldn’t be too concerned about their location data being collected through the dark web. The company has initiated an investigation into the matter and will decide on further steps upon completion.

Like modern vehicles Get more and more onlineit opens them to countless new dangers. It was only last year when a viral TikTok challenge educated Hyundai users How to hack their carsWhich led to more than ten accidents and eight deaths.