‘Human error’ puts data of 2.15 million Toyota leaves users at risk of data leak for over one decade 

Toyota Motor Corp said on Friday admitted that the vehicle data of 2.15 million customers in Japan, including those of its luxury brand Lexus, had been publicly available for almost a decade due to ‘human error’. The incident, which affected nearly the entire customer base who signed up for Toyota’s main cloud service platforms since 2012, was caused by a cloud system being set to public instead of private.

It also affected customers who signed up for the T-Connect — a service that provides a wide range of services including AI voice-enabled driving assistance, auto connection to call centres for vehicle management, and emergency support in such cases as a traffic accident or sudden illness — and Lexus vehicle’s G-Link services were affected. 

As per the company, while there have been no reports of malicious use, details such as vehicle locations and identification numbers of vehicle devices could have been compromised. 

This incident, as per Reuters, comes to light as Toyota is making a push into vehicle connectivity and cloud-based data management to offer autonomous driving and other artificial intelligence-backed features.

Responding to a question regarding why it took Toyota so long to realise the mistake, a spokesperson for the company said “There was a lack of active detection mechanisms, and activities to detect the presence or absence of things that became public.”

The issue as per Reuters began in November 2013 and lasted until mid-April of this year.

The Personal Information Protection Commission in Japan has been notified of an incident, but the body has declined to disclose details in accordance with their practice. Toyota has taken measures to prevent unauthorised outside access to the data and is conducting an investigation of all cloud environments managed by Toyota Connected Corp.

Toyota’s announcement follows several other major data breaches in Japan, including one in March when mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo said the data of up to 5.29 million customers may have leaked via a company to which it had outsourced work.

The incident adds to a series of challenges Koji Sato, who took over as Toyota CEO on April 1 from Akio Toyoda faces.

(With inputs from agencies)

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