Swedish Volkswagen cars affected by major data leak

Volkswagen has suffered a major data breach, reports mirror.

68,000 electric cars in Sweden are affected.

– I am shocked, says the politician Nadja Weippert, who could be tracked in the Volkswagen app.

“You can see who is parking at home, outside the intelligence service or in front of the brothel,” writes Spiegel.

GPS data from 800,000 electric cars around the world has been unprotected in Amazon’s cloud storage for several months, according to the German site.

68,000 of the cars are in Sweden.

In addition to Volkswagen, electric cars from Seat, Audi and Skoda are affected, and thus their owners.

The flaw was discovered after a whistleblower informed Spiegel and the ethical hacker group Chaos Computer Club (CCC).

With German politician and Volkswagen owner Nadja Weippert’s permission, the hackers were able to track her via the car’s app.

– I am shocked. It cannot be that my data is stored unencrypted in Amazon’s cloud and is not adequately protected. I expect VW to stop this and to anonymize the data they collect, she told Spiegel.

Volkswagen writes in an email to Aftonbladet that it shut down the vulnerability after being contacted by the hacker group.

“Only data from selected vehicles that were registered for online services and had online connectivity were affected. The information was obtained in a very complex process in several steps. The CCC has been able to gain access to pseudonymised vehicle data which does not make it possible to draw any conclusions about individuals. It was only by bypassing several security mechanisms that required a high level of expertise and a significant amount of time, as well as by combining different data sets, that CCC was able to draw conclusions about individual customer data for specific users,” writes communications manager Fabian Lebersorger.

According to Volkswagen, car owners do not need to take any action.