Information about the movements of at least two German politicians, businessmen, and possibly German intelligence officers has become publicly available.
Information about the movements of at least two German politicians, businessmen, and possibly German intelligence officers has become publicly available.
As a result of a data leak, data on the movement of about 800,000 electric vehicles from the Volkswagen Group has become publicly available, Spiegel reports .
Software developer Cariad, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, reportedly stored data from hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles almost unprotected in Amazon's cloud storage.
The information provided parking locations and detailed driving routes for Volkswagen, Seat, Audi, and Skoda electric vehicles in Europe and other parts of the world. Most of the recordings were made during 2024. This information could be used to find vehicle owners and learn their daily schedules.
Information about the movements of at least two German politicians, businessmen, 35 Hamburg police patrol cars, and possibly German intelligence officers has become publicly available.
The security flaw was first discovered by the German hacking community Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which alerted Cariad on November 26. The community gave the company 30 days to hide data from unauthorized users, after which the hackers promised to inform the public about the vulnerability.
The publication's team of IT experts and journalists believes that gaining access to the data was not a problem for special services, competitors of the automaker, or "just bored teenagers." It was enough to have a few standard hacking programs that allow you to find out the final location of the files.
On December 27, Volkswagen Group announced that it had fixed the bug. The company insists that the incident did not affect any confidential information, such as passwords or payment details. With the exception of CCC, no one had access to the data, the company said in a statement. Volkswagen Group also believes that the information the hackers exposed did not allow them to learn anything specific about the car owners.
