{"id":567,"date":"2024-12-31T06:10:23","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T06:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/?p=567"},"modified":"2024-12-31T06:10:23","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T06:10:23","slug":"volkswagen-data-leak-exposed-location-information-of-800000-vehicles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/archives\/567","title":{"rendered":"Volkswagen Data Leak Exposed Location Information of 800,000 Vehicles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For several months, the location data of nearly\u00a0800,000<\/strong> electric Volkswagen<\/strong>\u00a0vehicles was accessible online due to a significant data leak, according to a report from the German magazine\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/strong>. The leak, which originated from software within the vehicles, could have allowed malicious actors to track drivers’ precise movements, as noted by\u00a0Electrek<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A whistleblower<\/strong> informed Der Spiegel<\/strong> and the European hacking group Chaos Computer Club<\/strong> about the vulnerability, which also affected electric vehicles (EVs) from other Volkswagen<\/strong> brands, including Audi<\/strong>, Seat<\/strong>, and Skoda<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The leak was traced back to Cariad<\/strong>, Volkswagen\u2019s software subsidiary, which stored driver data on Amazon\u2019s cloud platform<\/strong>. This data included not only the vehicles’ activation and deactivation times<\/strong> but also sensitive information like names<\/strong>, contact details<\/strong>, and in some cases, addresses<\/strong>. The most concerning aspect was the precise location<\/strong> of around 460,000<\/strong> vehicles\u2014Volkswagen and Seat models had location data accurate to within 10 cm<\/strong> (~4 inches), while Audi and Skoda models had location data accurate to within 10 km<\/strong> (~6 miles).<\/p>\n\n\n\n


While Cariad<\/strong> has since addressed the issue, stating that customers don’t need to take any action since no sensitive information<\/strong> like passwords<\/strong> or payment details<\/strong> was exposed, the leak serves as a stark reminder of the vast amount of personal data modern vehicles collect. The data privacy risks associated with these technologies have been called a “privacy nightmare<\/strong>” by organizations like Mozilla<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For several months, the location data of nearly\u00a0800,000 electric Volkswagen\u00a0vehicles was accessible online due to a significant data leak, according to a report from the German magazine\u00a0Der Spiegel. The leak, which originated from software within the vehicles, could have allowed malicious actors to track drivers’ precise movements, as noted by\u00a0Electrek. A whistleblower informed Der Spiegel and the European hacking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":569,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.batteryone.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}