June 18, 2021
Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. has uncovered a data gap after a salesman put customer data online unsecured between August 2019 and May 2021.
The data glitch affected 3.3 million customers of Audi, Volkswagen and a number of dealers in the US and Canada.
Some of the leaked data included information about names, private or business postal addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers.
In some cases, the data also included information about a vehicle purchased, leased or retrieved, such as the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), make, model, year of manufacture, color, and trim packages.
The sold data consists of over 5 million records, of which 3,862,231 records are contained as leads and 1,792,278 records in the sales database.
While the leads database contains contact information and phone numbers for prospective buyers, the seller states that the sales database contained much more information, including VINs, business numbers, driver information and vehicle information.
The hacker said they accessed the exposed data last March after locating it in an unsecured Azure Blob container.
The hackers are demanding a hefty sum of $4,000 and $5,000 for all records, saying the database does not contain customers’ social security numbers.
The threat actors mentioned that they were selling the database for a VPN service provider with multiple Android apps in the Google Play Store for $1,000.
For more information, read the original story in BleepingComputer.
