Customer data from 800,000 electric cars and owners exposed online \ stacker news ~security

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Customer data from 800,000 electric cars and owners exposed online www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/customer-data-from-800-000-electric-cars-and-owners-exposed-online

1341 sats \ 7 comments \ @cyphercosmo 4 Jan security

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322 sats \ 1 reply \ @clr 4 Jan

The question is why do they collect all that information in the first place?

Then there is Tesla, who in trying to prove that the Las Vegas explosion was not their fault, reveals that they can lock/unlock your car remotely and watch and record through its cameras.

Electric vehicle = privacy nightmare ?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyphercosmo OP 4 Jan

It is a nightmare, our hope is that the cypherpunk ethos somehow find its way into the auto industry and build us alternatives.

Good thing is that the world is full of other cars that are just too dumb, we can stick to them meanwhile 😝

On the topic of why they collect it in the first place is something that triggers me deeply, having worked in many digital product companies they do it for the following reasons (roughly):

To comply with some sort of law which implicates the government for making the attack surface bigger and harder to protect
To learn from the data applying data science and machine learning algorithms. This is one of the reasons I didn't feel good at first about the rise of AI, it creates an industry-wide incentive to keep huge volumes of data in warehouses, databases, etc, and then hope their engineers have the security maturity to do threat modelling, to active work on discovering/addressing vulnerabilities, and all the practices required to secure the data.
Their employees will see customers data. There are very few industries that actually develop the processes and tech to avoid exposing customer data to employees, sometimes employees will want production data to reproduce some issue and often they dump the whole database locally to understand what's going on. The problem is that their computers might be compromised, or they might have malicious intent, and so on, which becomes a common path for leaks to happen.

From a security standpoint if companies didn't persist any of this sensitive data it would be ideal because the attack surface is drastically reduced. Other parts of the business might want that data persisted, and I don't blame them as this has been the culture in the last decade. I still get that look when I talk to people about privacy, it's like I'm a mad man a step closer to wearing a thin foil hat. Life is crazy like that.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @AlCoHoLnAcEtOnE 4 Jan

That didn't take long 😕

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 4 Jan

This one has already been posted, different link though.

Massive VW Data Leak Exposed 800,000 EV Owners’ Movements

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cyphercosmo OP 4 Jan

Thanks for pointing that out, I always check for dupes before I post but since this one wasn't and I read it today I decided to share it.

165 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 4 Jan

No problem. I actually remembered about reading the same recently, so looked at "related posts" to yours and found it.

Apart from dupes, it's better to look inside related posts for old stories. But it's a good one, zapped already big. That one was also zapped big.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LowK3y19 4 Jan

When driving a Tesla goes bad…