Toyota India Warns of Possible Data Breach Exposing Customers’ Personal Information

A data breach at Toyota Motor’s Indian business might have exposed some customers’ personal information, it said on Sunday. Toyota India said it has notified the relevant Indian authorities of the data breach at Toyota Kirloskar Motor, a joint venture with Indian conglomerate Kirloskar Group.

“Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) has been notified by one of its service providers of an incident that might have exposed personal information of some of TKM’s customers on the Internet”, TKM said in an emailed statement without disclosing the size of the data breach or number of customers affected.

An unrelated issue at Toyota Motor’s T-Connect service potentially leaked about 296,000 pieces of customer information, it said last October.

At the time, Toyota Group had stated it had found that about 296,000 pieces of customer information from its T-Connect service might have been leaked.

Back in October, the firm said 296,019 email addresses and customer numbers of those using T-Connect, a telematics service that connects vehicles via a network, were potentially leaked. The affected customers are individuals who signed up to the service’s website using their email addresses since July 2017.

A third-party access could not be confirmed from the access history of the data server where the information was stored based on security experts’ investigation, Toyota said in a statement at the time.

At the same time, it added that third-party access “could not be completely ruled out.” There was no possibility, though, that users’ sensitive personal information, such as names, phone numbers or credit card information, were leaked, Toyota had stated.

The Japanese automaker had not confirmed cases of the information being misused but cautioned that there was a possibility of spamming, phishing scams and unsolicited email messages being sent to the users’ email addresses.

© Thomson Reuters 2023