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VW electric cars leaking data
Volkswagen accidentally leaked, or left open to the public via the cloud, location data and personal information of the owner for more then 800,000 electric cars.
After setting up the app, her car apparently began collecting and transmitting data to the manufacturer, including the exact GPS location of where she parked it every time she turned off the engine.
A data volume of several terabytes on around 800,000 electric cars was largely unprotected and accessible for months in an Amazon cloud storage system .
Much of the vehicle data could be linked to the names and contact details of the drivers, owners or fleet managers. Precise location data was available for 460,000 vehicles, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the lives of the people behind the wheel
The cloud storage itself contained the data of the individual vehicles, immediately recognizable by the names for the battery charge level, the inspection status and the categories "engine on" and "engine off". The latter contained not only the time but also the longitude and latitude lines and thus the position of the car when the electric motor was switched off. In the case of VW models and Seats, this geodata was accurate to within ten centimeters,
Cariad responded within a few hours and did not even try to downplay the matter. The team responsible for security incidents thanked them and asked for further details. The gap has now been closed.
