Toyota and Lexus cars face massive data breach, customer's private info leaked

Data breach in the automobile industry is rising, with several automakers falling prey to hackers. Toyota and Lexus are also among these carmakers. The Japanese automobile group has revealed that private information of its customers in Japan, as well as in other countries throughout Asia and Oceania region, was leaked to the public. The auto major has said that the information was available to the public between October 2016 and May 2023.

Toyota has said the data breach happened due to two separate incidents. The automaker said that in the case impacting customers in Asia and Oceania, some of the files managed by Toyota Connected Corporation in the cloud for overseas dealers' maintenance requirements and investigation of systems were accessible externally due to a misconfiguration.

However, the Japanese car brand has not said how many customers are impacted by the problem. The company said that the private information leaked to the public includes details such as addresses, names, phone numbers, email addresses, customer IDs, vehicle registration numbers and vehicle identification numbers. Reuters has reported that the carmaker is investigating the issue based on the laws and regulations of each country from where the affected vehicle owners belong.

In another incident that was limited to Japan, approximately 260,000 customers using the Lexus G-Link connected services were affected by a data breach. Their vehicle identification numbers, map data updates and other mapping system data were leaked publicly. However, Toyota claims that the leak doesn't include any data that can be used to identify the vehicle owners. These two data breaches came just a couple of weeks after Toyota revealed that the vehicle data of its 2.15 million customers in Japan had been publicly accessible between November 2013 and April 2023.