Vulnerability in Toyota Management Platform Provided Access to Customer Data

A severe vulnerability in the Toyota Customer 360 customer relationship management (CRM) platform allowed a security researcher to access the personal information of the car maker’s customers in Mexico.

The web application aggregates customer data from across the organization, providing a single view of all customer information, including personal information and purchase and service details.

While analyzing the CRM, US-based researcher Eaton Zveare discovered that Toyota deployed five versions of the platform (three for development purposes, one for testing, and one in production), and that he could modify the development app to access production data.

The researcher was able to bypass authentication in the application and then access customer data, including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle history, purchase and service data, and tax ID.

What Zveare discovered was that he would receive a ‘403 request blocked’ error message when attempting to access the production page, but that he could modify Angular JavaScript code on the development/testing web applications to bypass authentication.

Next, he was able to locate API endpoints that were exposed via loading spinner settings, and to update the development application to use a production API instead.

According to Zveare, the APIs did not require an authentication token and would return data if a well-formed request was sent. While locking down the production application should have provided protection, the APIs were exposed across all environments after being included in the dev app.

“The production and qa API endpoints use Amazon API Gateway and probably would have been impossible to find if they weren’t included in the dev app’s code. With the login bypass and API change in place, it was possible to access production data,” the researcher notes.

Once access to the application was achieved, the researcher could search for customer data by name, phone number, ID, or email address. However, the application did not expose a user list and the researcher could not determine how many customers were in the CRM.

Zveare reported the issue to Toyota on October 30. The car maker resolved the vulnerability less than three weeks later.  

“Toyota fixed the issue by taking some of the sites offline and updating the APIs to require an authentication token,” the researcher explains.

A month ago, Zveare disclosed an issue in Toyota’s global supplier management network web portal, which provided him with access to thousands of user accounts (employee and partner accounts) and allowed him to exfiltrate and tamper with sensitive data.

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