Nissan has confirmed that personal data belonging to customers of a Japanese sales subsidiary was exposed following unauthorized access to a Red Hat development environment, linking the incident to a broader breach that occurred in late September.
Unauthorized Access To Red Hat GitLab Instance
The incident occurred in late September and involved unauthorized access to a GitLab instance used by Red Hat. The compromised environment contained example code snippets, internal communications, and project specifications.
A hacking group calling itself Crimson Collective later claimed responsibility and attempted to extort Red Hat. The group alleged it had stolen 570 gigabytes of compressed data from 28,000 private repositories, including information it said could provide access to Red Hat customers’ infrastructure.
Nissan Customer Data Included In Stolen Files
Nissan said some of the data taken from Red Hat’s systems included personal information related to approximately 21,000 customers of Nissan Fukuoka Sales, previously known as Fukuoka Nissan Motor.
According to Nissan, the exposed personal data includes customer names, addresses, phone numbers, partial email addresses, and information used for sales activities. The company said no credit card information was involved and that no other customer data was stored in the affected repository.
Timeline And Notification
Nissan said Red Hat notified the company of the breach on October 3, about one week after the unauthorized access occurred.
In an incident notice published by Nissan, the company said it received a report from Red Hat, which had outsourced development of a customer management system for a Nissan sales company, stating that its data servers had been accessed without authorization and that data had been leaked.
Response And Ongoing Review
Nissan said it has reported the incident to the relevant authorities and has begun notifying individuals whose information was affected by the breach.
The company also stated that it could not confirm claims that the stolen data may have been “used twice” by the threat actors.
Featured image credits: Pixnio
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.