• Toyota says it has discovered another batch of customer data that was left exposed following a misconfiguration.
• The data has left exposed from February 2015 to May 2023.
• Toyota previously discovered the data of 2.15 million car owners in a similar manner.

Toyota has quite a bit of explaining to do, after the Japanese car maker discovered a second batch of customer data that was left exposed for close to a decade. This discovery follows one made earlier this month in which the data of 2.15 million car owners was left exposed due to a misconfiguration.

Toyota says this second batch was discovered after it ran an in-depth investigation into the matter, although it remains to be seen if there will be discoveries of this nature down the line.

For this set of exposed data, a far smaller figure of 260 000 car owners is estimated, however it still represents a significant oversight by the company.

“Subsequently, we conducted an investigation for all cloud environments managed by TOYOTA Connected Corporation (TC). It was further discovered that a part of the data containing customer information had been potentially accessible externally. We would like to inform you of the incident that has been identified as of today,” the company explained in an apologetic press statement.

“In addition, we will work closely again with TC to explain and thoroughly enforce the rules for data handling. We will also work to prevent a recurrence by thoroughly educating our employees once again. We sincerely apologize to our customers and all relevant parties for any concern and inconvenience this may have caused,” it added.

This second batch is said to have been exposed from February 2015 to May 2023, but it does not look to have impacted any car owners in South Africa, with those in Asia and Oceania being alerted as to the discovery.

That said, vehicles purchased as far back as December 2007 are said to have been found in the exposed data. For now though, it does not appear like the data was accessed or used for any nefarious ends, according to the car marker.

“We have also investigated whether, with this incident, there was any secondary use or if third-party copies remain on the Internet, and no evidence of such has been found. At present, we have not confirmed any secondary damage,” it concluded.

[Image – Photo by Christina Telep on Unsplash]