Toyota admits another data leak affecting 2.6 lakh car owners

Japanese automotive giant Toyota has admitted another incident in which data of around 260,000 car owners was exposed to the internet for a decade.

Last month, the company issued an apology after it discovered that nearly 2.15 million customers' partial data was made public "due to misconfiguration of the Cloud environment" for a decade.

Toyota has now identified another batch of exposed data that was "potentially accessible externally due to a misconfiguration" of its connected cloud service.

The carmaker said it would notify customers with a separate apology whose information was exposed.

"This incident also was caused by insufficient dissemination and enforcement of data handling rules, since our last announcement, we have implemented a system to monitor cloud configurations," said the company.

Currently, the system is in operation to check the settings of all cloud environments and to monitor the settings on an ongoing basis.

"We sincerely apologise to our customers and all relevant parties for any concern and inconvenience this may have caused," said Toyota.

Toyota also confirmed that an unknown number of customers outside of Japan, specifically in Asia, had their personal information exposed between October 2016 and May 2023.

Last month, the company sent an apology and notification to the registered email address for customers whose in-vehicle terminal ID, chassis number, vehicle location information, and time may have been leaked.