Roughly 21,000 Nissan customers have had their personal information compromised following a cyberattack on American software firm Red Hat in late September. Fortunately, no sensitive credit card information was stolen during the incident.
The breach originated from a targeted attack on Red Hat that resulted in the theft of several hundred gigabytes of data from approximately 28,000 private GitLab repositories.
Red Hat had been contracted by Nissan to develop a customer management system for one of its regional sales operations, Nissan Fukuoka Sales Co.
According to a statement released by Nissan this week, Red Hat notified the automaker of the breach on October 3. Stolen data included names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and other customer-related information used in sales activities.
While there is currently no evidence that the stolen data has been used maliciously, Nissan has urged affected customers to exercise caution when receiving unexpected communications, including suspicious phone calls or unsolicited mail claiming to be from the company.
“Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. received a report from Red Hat, the company it commissioned to develop customer management systems for its sales companies, that unauthorized access to its data servers had resulted in the data being leaked,” the company said in a statement.
“It was later confirmed that the data leaked by the company contained some customer information from Nissan Fukuoka Sales Co., Ltd.”
At this time, Nissan has not clarified whether it will contact each affected individual directly. The company did note, however, that the compromised data appears to be limited to customers in Japan, suggesting that owners in the US and other regions were likely not impacted.
“Nissan takes this incident very seriously and will strengthen its monitoring of its subcontractors and take further steps to strengthen information security,” the statement continued. “We would like to once again offer our deepest apologies to our customers for any inconvenience caused.”
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