According to a report by the German Press Agency on December 27, Germany's "Der Spiegel" reported on the 27th that a data leak occurred at Caryard Software, a subsidiary of the German car manufacturer Volkswagen, causing the personal details of European electric car owners to remain online for several months. According to the weekly, the movement data of 800,000 vehicles and their owner contact details can be accessed through Amazon's cloud storage platform.
According to the report, the accurate location data of 460,000 Volkswagen, Seat, Audi and Skoda cars can also be seen.
Volkswagen said in a statement that it had corrected the mistake and that sensitive information such as user passwords or payment data was not affected.
The statement said that no one had access to the data except the Chaos Computer Club, a large European hacker group that alerted Cariad Software to the error on November 26.
The statement also said that only specific vehicles registered for the online service and already connected to the network were affected.
Volkswagen said data related to charging behavior and charging software were affected, but it assured users that "accessing the data requires a very complex multi-step process."
Volkswagen said Chaos Computer Club accessed pseudonymized vehicle data but that the data did not allow conclusions to be drawn about specific individuals.
The statement continued: "Only with a high level of technical skill, a significant amount of time spent bypassing several security mechanisms, and combined with other data sets, was the Chaos Computer Club able to draw conclusions about a specific user's personal data."
The company said it was analyzing the incident. Once the analysis is complete, the company will decide whether to take further steps, if necessary. (Compiled/Zheng Guoyi)