Japanese car maker Toyota this week announced that cloud configuration issues have led to years-long exposure of customer data.
The impacted environments, which are managed by Toyota Connected Corporation (TC), contain information related to the vehicles of Japanese customers, as well as the personal information of customers overseas.
The incident, Toyota says, was the result of insufficient dissemination and enforcement of data handling rules, and checks are being performed on all environments to ensure the safety of data.
According to the car maker, the in-vehicle device ID, map data updates, and map data creation dates related to the vehicles of approximately 260,000 customers in Japan were potentially exposed between February 2015 and May 2023.
The data belongs to customers who subscribed to G-Book with a G-Book mX or G-Book mX Pro compatible navigation system, and to those who subscribed to G-Link or G-Link Lite and renewed the service between February 2015 and March 2022.
“In principle, the above customer information is automatically deleted from the cloud environment within a short period of time after the map data is distributed and is not continuously stored or accumulated during the above period,” the company says.
The misconfigured environments also store files related to overseas dealers’ maintenance, which may have exposed personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, customer IDs, VINs, and vehicle registration numbers.
The data was potentially exposed between October 2016 and May 2023. The impacted customers are in some countries in Asia and Oceania.
Toyota says it is in the process of notifying all impacted individuals. The number of impacted customers has not been disclosed.
The car maker also notes that it has found no evidence of the potentially exposed data being traded or offered on the internet.
This notification comes just weeks after the company admitted exposing data associated with more than two million vehicles in Japan over a period of more than a decade.
Related: Vulnerability in Toyota Management Platform Provided Access to Customer Data
Related: Vulnerability Provided Access to Toyota Supplier Management Network