Toyota faces new hurdle with potential customer data leak

Toyota is facing a new hurdle after admitting a possible customer data leak due to issues with cloud settings.

Additionally, the Japanese carmaker stated that the said incident was also caused by insufficient dissemination and enforcement of data handling rules.

“It was discovered that part of the data that Toyota Motor Corporation entrusted to Toyota Connected Corporation to manage had been made public due to misconfiguration of the cloud environment... We apologize for causing great inconvenience and concern to our customers and related parties,” Toyota said in a press release. 

In Japan, Toyota said that owners of Lexus models like the LS, GS, LFA, and RX who have subscribed to G-Book with a G-Book mX or G-Book mX Pro compatible navigation system could have had their in-vehicle device ID, map data updates, and updated data creation dates accessed externally.

About 260,000 Japanese automobile owners are said to be affected by this issue.

Globally, Toyota said that the bits of information that might have been accessed externally include the customer’s address, name, phone number, email address, customer ID, vehicle registration number, and chassis number.

Toyota did not say how many of its customers were affected by the issue outside of Japan.

In response, the company’s connected services arm, Toyota Connected Corporation, said that it has implemented safety measures to address the issue. 

“Currently, a system is in operation to investigate the settings of all cloud environments and to continuously monitor the setting status. In addition, we will once again work closely with Toyota Motor Corporation to explain and enforce the rules for data handling, and we will work to prevent recurrence by thoroughly educating employees,” Toyota Connected Corporation wrote in a press release.

The said measures, although not clearly explained, were said to block attempts to access Toyota’s customer details externally.

Toyota appears to be facing a handful of challenges as the potential data leak issue comes after Hino’s rigged emission results as well as the fraudulent impact test results of Daihatsu. 

Photos from Toyota

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