Hackers were able to acquire access to individuals’ personal information after Hyundai announced a data breach that affected vehicle owners in Italy and France as well as those who had scheduled test drives with the automaker. According to Troy Hunt, the author of the website “HaveIBeenPwned,” the event has caused the personal data of clients to become public.
The letter also makes it clear that the individual who hacked into Hyundai’s database did not take any financial information or identifying numbers. It is unknown how many Hyundai customers have been impacted by this event, how long the network attack lasted, or what additional nations may be at risk. Customers of a South Korean automobile manufacturer are being cautioned to be wary of unsolicited e-mails and SMS messages that pretend to come from the company. These communications might be efforts at phishing or social engineering. In response to the incident, Hyundai claims it has enlisted the help of information technology specialists, who have taken the affected systems down while new security measures are put into place. In February of 2023, the business released emergency software patches for a number of car models that had been compromised by a simple hack with a USB cable, which had made it possible for criminals to take the vehicles.
On the other hand, the Japanese automaker Toyota has admitted that there may have been a breach of consumer data due to security flaws at its operations in Italy. Throughout the course of more than one and a half years, up until this past March, Toyota Italy carelessly disclosed confidential information. In particular, it divulged confidential information on its Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Mapbox APIs. Threat actors might utilize this information to their advantage to acquire access to the telephone numbers and email addresses of Toyota customers and then use those details to start phishing attacks on those customers. According to the findings of the research team at Cybernews, the organization exposed credentials to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is a supplier of software and services related to digital marketing automation and analytics. Threat actors might get access to phone numbers and email addresses, as well as customer monitoring information, as well as the contents of email, SMS, and push-notification messages by abusing the data. Moreover, Toyota Italy exposed the application programming interface (API) tokens for the software business Mapbox. These tokens were used to access map data. Although while the data is not as sensitive as the credentials for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is still possible for threat actors to misuse it in order to query a large number of queries and drive up Toyota’s API use costs.
Toyota is not the only automaker that has lately put itself as well as its consumers in Italy in a vulnerable position. In January of this year, the Indian branch of Toyota Motor announced a data breach, claiming that it was possible that the personal information of some of its customers had been exposed.
Information security specialist, currently working as risk infrastructure specialist & investigator.
15 years of experience in risk and control process, security audit support, business continuity design and support, workgroup management and information security standards.
