Volkswagen ends the year with a deal that the brand would have done well without. A huge security breach has reportedly been discovered, affecting no less than 800,000 of the group's electric cars. Fortunately, no personal data has been intercepted by malicious hackers.
That's it, the year 2024 is finally over. And we can say that it will not have spared the car manufacturers, who have had to face a major crisis, in line with the Covid-19 pandemic. And not everyone was in the same boat, quite the contrary.
A new crisis at Volkswagen
If Tesla should end the year on a positive note, and perhaps remain the leader in electric cars ahead of BYD, others have suffered much more chaotic months. This is particularly the case for Volkswagen, which had great difficulty selling its cars and which had to implement a draconian plan to reduce its losses. The firm also announced its plan to eliminate 1/3 of the workforce in Germany, as well as the Brussels site where production of the Audi Q8 e-tron is carried out.
And that's not all, because the Wolfsburg manufacturer can't even breathe the time of the transition to the new year. Because on this last day of 2024, here we area new scandal surfacesrevealed by the German media The mirror. Several drivers of the brand's electric cars have noticed that their location data was accessible to everyone. And it's not just Volkswagens that have this problem, but all the group's zero-emission (exhaust) vehicles.
That is to say that owners of Skoda, Seat, Cupra or even Audi are also affected. In total, the personal data ofaround 800,000 drivers would be freely accessible to all, which obviously poses a major security problem. Because the location of the cars would be displayed in clear text, allowing a potential malicious person to know where a car is parked in order to steal it, for example. Where to follow the person who drives it. In short, everything is imaginable in this situation.
Especially since other confidential details could also be accessible via Amazon's cloud storage service. Among them, email and phone number of the car owner, as well as his personal address. In addition, it was also possible to know when the vehicle was on or off. What is even more worrying is that more than 460,000 of them displayed their precise location, at ten centimeters close for those of the Volkswagen brand.
Another concern from Cariad
As for the rest of the group, the accuracy isabout 10 meterswhich still remains very alarming. But what is this big mistake due to? Well, unsurprisingly, this is to be found on the side of Cariad, the subsidiary of the German group in charge of the design of embedded software. The latter has a series of unpleasant surprises, since it is also responsible for postponing the launch of the SSP platform, which should ultimately be launched in 2028.
Concerns that have lasted for several years, and which even prompted Volkswagen to make job cuts. And truth be told, data leaks don't actually happen today. Because according to the German media, the subsidiary made an error last summer, but it has not noticed anything since. These are two German whistleblowers who pinpointed the problem, which would be linked to the application associated with cars, which store a lot of personal data.
Fortunately, no malicious hacker has looked into the issue and stole these. For his part, Cariad indicated that the drivers concerned had “not no action required as no sensitive information such as passwords or payment details is affected “. The subsidiary is not talking about a security breach, but rather a “bad configuration”.
On the other hand, Volkswagen has not commented, and for the moment, we do not know whether the problem has been definitively resolved or not. But the firm is not the only one to have such concerns, as reported by Der Spiegel, which also mentions Kia as well as Jeep and BMW.
