Toyota Motor Company Faces Several Data Breaches: Lacking Cybersecurity Affects Millions of Car Owners

Lacking Cybersecurity - Generated via MidJourney

Three weeks ago, Toyota Motor Corp revealed a significant data breach that impacted 2.15 million vehicle owners in Japan. The breach, caused by human error, resulted in the public availability of customer vehicle data for a decade. The incident raised concerns as Toyota expands its vehicle connectivity and cloud-based data management services to support advanced features like autonomous driving and artificial intelligence.

Just two days ago, Toyota Motor Corp uncovered yet another data breach, further raising concerns about the security of their customer data. This time, the breach involved the exposure of personal information belonging to 260,000 car owners over a span of seven years. The incident was discovered during an investigation into the car manufacturer's cloud services following the announcement of their previous breach.

This second breach stemmed from two misconfigured cloud services within Toyota's system, with the affected service being Toyota Connected. This platform allows Toyota car owners to access various internet-based features in their vehicles, including entertainment services, emergency assistance, and location-based services.

During the breach, customer information such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, and vehicle registration numbers were potentially accessible to external sources from October 2016 until the time of discovery. Notably, Toyota emphasises that no financial or vehicle location-related data was compromised in this breach.

In response to the breaches, Toyota have issued apologies and official statements acknowledging the incidents. The company takes responsibility for the breaches and acknowledges that they resulted from insufficient enforcement of data handling rules. As a result, Toyota has implemented a system to monitor cloud configurations to prevent similar incidents in the future.

The recent data breaches experienced by Toyota Motor Company have once again highlighted the vulnerability of customer data within the cloud. With personal information from 260,000 car owners exposed over a prolonged period, concerns regarding data security are rightly raised. While Toyota is working to rectify the issue and prevent future breaches, this incident serves as a reminder for all organisations to prioritise robust data protection measures to safeguard customer information.

At Robust IT, we help students to become the cybersecurity and cloud computing professionals that are needed by companies like Toyota in order to ensure that these concerning incidents do not occur. Professionals in this industry are in high demand because all companies want to protect their data and retain customer trust.

For more information and comprehensive training programs on cybersecurity or cloud computing, visit Robust IT Training at www.robustittraining.com