Leak at Tesla exposes “extremely serious” security breach

2023-05-29 13:39:37

Tesla would not have adequately protected the data up to 100,000 employees, customers and business partners. This was revealed last Friday by the German economic newspaper Handelsblatt, which has had access to a massive leak of confidential information from the manufacturer of electric cars who drives Elon Musk.

In a investigative report seriesthe newspaper claims to have had access to 100 gigabytes of private data from the company, including the names of employees, their email addresses, their telephone number, their salaries, the Bank data of customers and secrets of Tesla production. Among those 23,000 files, leaked by a whistleblower, would also be the social security number of Musk, CEO of the company.

Such a leak would violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU), which, if proven, could lead to fines of up to a maximum of 3,260 million euros for Tesla. The Brandenburg data protection office, where the company’s European gigafactory operates, have already opened an investigation to clarify a matter that they have described as “extremely serious”. “I don’t remember a similar scale,” said the German ‘länder’ data protection officer, Dagmar Hartge.

thousands of complaints

The leaked files also point to a large number of complaints from Tesla customers about the programs driver assistancewith about 4,000 on the sudden acceleration of vehicles or the so-called phantom braking.

Tesla explained to Handelsblatt that he suspected that behind the filtration there was a “disgruntled former employee” who had “used his access as a service technician to extract information”, so he is considering taking legal action. The German regulator also noted that the possibility “exists” that the data was accessible from within the company.

The IG Metall union, the largest and most influential in Germany, has called the revelations “disturbing”. For its part, the Netherlands Data Protection Agency, where Tesla’s European headquarters are located, has also reported that it is investigating a possible violation of the company led by Musk.