Hackers likely stole data from nearly 300,000 Toyota customers. The Japanese car maker reported this on Friday.
Toyota determined that 296,019 customer email addresses and associated customer numbers may have been compromised, it said in a press release. This concerns data from people who use Toyota’s online service T-Connect.
At Toyota Germany, it sounds like there is not yet a list of the stolen data per country or region. Toyota also reported that other data, such as names, telephone numbers, and credit card numbers, could not have been stolen. On the other hand, cyber experts warn that basic data is sufficient to bombard someone with a phishing attack (online fraud via false messages).
According to Toyota, the data breach was located at a supplier. At the end of 2017, he accidentally shared part of the program code on the GitHub platform. That code contained the access key for a data server, which contained the email addresses and customer numbers in question.
In 2019, the data of some 3.1 million Toyota customers was stolen by hackers. Earlier this year, the company had to pause production after suppliers fell victim to a cyber attack.
