Swedish electric cars in huge GPS leak

 

Volkswagen
Major Volkswagen leak – data from thousands of Swedish cars was unprotected

Emil Forsberg

Updated 12.23 | Published 11.00

68,000 Swedish electric cars affected by the major leak from Volkswagen. Photo: Jens Meyer / AP

Volkswagen has suffered a major data leak, reports Spiegel.

68,000 electric cars in Sweden are affected.

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

“You can see who parks 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).

Photo: Sina Schuldt / AP

With the permission of the German politician and Volkswagen owner, Nadja Weippert, 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 protected sufficiently. I expect VW to stop this and that they anonymize the data they collect, she tells Spiegel.

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

"Only data from selected vehicles that were registered for online services and had an online connection was affected. The data was obtained in a very complex process in several steps. CCC has been able to access pseudonymized vehicle data that does not make it possible to draw any conclusions about individual people. 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.