Hackers claim Volkswagen dealer data is for sale

Hackers claim to have breached a Volkswagen dealership. The client's data is allegedly up for sale.

A threat actor on an infamous cybercrime forum has claimed to have breached Volkswagen Mandi, an official car dealership located in Himachal Pradesh, India.

The attacker claims to have breached the company this year and exfiltrated 2.5 million rows of the dealership's and its clientele's personal information, which is now being sold publicly.

The stash appears to be a spill from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) backend. The data sample provided with the listing suggests that the following type of personal information has been exfiltrated:

Full names
Home addresses
Zip codes
Phone numbers
Emails

There still hasn't been public confirmation from the company regarding the cyber incident.

Cybernews has reached out to the company, but a response is yet to be received. Currently, it's not possible to verify the attacker's claims, as the data sample only includes eight rows of information.

The threat actor joined the forum in April this year and has previously listed multiple companies’ data for sale, also providing data samples with a few lines of information.

“If the breach proves to be legitimate, the stolen data could be exploited for identity profiling for future attacks. There is an increased risk of social engineering attacks for the affected people,” the Cybernews research team explained.

Volkswagen dealership breach — Screenshot of the listing on the cybercrime forum. Image by Cybernews.

Not the first time Volkswagen claimed by hackers

Volkswagen and its dealership have been actively targeted by cybercriminals. In October, Volkswagen Group France, a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, was posted on the Qilin ransomware group’s leak site.

Qilin claimed to have exfiltrated about 2,000 files and 150GB of data consisting of sensitive client, employee, and business information.

In June, Volkswagen AG also appeared on the Stormous ransomware cartel’s dark web leak site. While the attackers claimed to have breached the company’s data, Volkswagen AG’s spokesperson told Cybernews that there was no indication of data theft.