The personal information of some of Toyota Motor’s customers may have been exposed online, according to a data breach report released on Sunday by Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM), a division of Toyota Motor in India. The Bengaluru headquartered company is a joint venture between the Japanese carmaker and the Indian Kirloskar group.
“The company has been notified by one of its service providers of an incident that might have exposed the personal information of some of TKM’s customers on the Internet,” Toyota Kirloskar Motor said in an emailed statement without disclosing the size of the data breach or number of customers affected. The company added that the Indian Computer Energy Response Team (CERT-In), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, had been notified about the situation.
In light of this event, Toyota Kirloskar Motor will work with its service provider to further strengthen the current extensive guidelines that are being followed and is completely dedicated to avoiding any form of disturbance to its esteemed customers. The carmaker also issued an apology to its customers for causing any concern regarding the incident.
No other information on the number of customers affected or what data was compromised has been given as of yet.
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This follows Toyota Kirloskar Motor’s announcement on Saturday that it will raise prices across the board starting on April 1 by up to 4% in order to alleviate the effects of growing input expenses, especially raw material costs.
This is not the first time Toyota Motor suffered a data breach. Toyota stated in October that from July 2017, it’s possible that the private data of close to 296,000 consumers has been compromised. This was due to an unrelated issue with T-Connect, a telematics service that connects vehicles via a network, that leaked the email addresses and customer management numbers of some customers who had subscribed to T-Connect services.
Based on an assessment by security professionals, Toyota stated in a statement at the time that third-party access could not be proven from the access history of the data server where the information was housed. There was no likelihood that consumers’ sensitive personal information, such as names, phone numbers, or credit card information, was exposed, Toyota had said. However, it added that third-party access “could not be completely ruled out.”
