techcrunch.com
Jagmeet Singh
6:30 PM PDT · October 28, 2025
A security researcher found the Indian automotive giant exposing personal information of its customers, internal company reports, and dealers’ data. Tata confirmed it fixed the issues.
Indian automotive giant Tata Motors has fixed a series of security flaws that exposed sensitive internal data, including personal information of customers, company reports, and data related to its dealers.
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that he discovered the flaws in Tata Motors’ E-Dukaan unit, an e-commerce portal for buying spare parts for Tata-made commercial vehicles. Headquartered in Mumbai, Tata Motors produces passenger cars, as well as commercial and defense vehicles. The company has a presence in 125 countries worldwide and seven assembly facilities, per its website.
Zveare said he found that the portal’s web source code included the private keys to access and modify data within Tata Motors’ account on Amazon Web Services, the researcher said in a blog post.
The exposed data, Zveare told TechCrunch, included hundreds of thousands of invoices containing customer information, such as their names, mailing addresses, and permanent account number (PAN), a 10-character unique identifier issued by the Indian government.
“Out of respect for not causing some type of alarm bell or massive egress bill at Tata Motors, there were no attempts to exfiltrate large amounts of data or download excessively large files,” the researcher told TechCrunch.
There were also MySQL database backups and Apache Parquet files that included various bits of private customer information and communication, the researcher noted.
The AWS keys also enabled access to over 70 terabytes of data related to Tata Motors’ FleetEdge fleet-tracking software. Zveare also found backdoor admin access to a Tableau account, which included data of over 8,000 users.
“As server admin, you had access to all of it. This primarily includes things like internal financial reports, performance reports, dealer scorecards, and various dashboards,” the researcher said.
The exposed data also included API access to Tata Motors’ fleet management platform, Azuga, which powers the company’s test drive website.
Shortly after discovering the issues, Zveare reported them to Tata Motors through the Indian computer emergency response team, known as CERT-In, in August 2023. Later in October 2023, Tata Motors told Zveare that it was working on fixing the AWS issues after securing the initial loopholes. However, the company did not say when the issues were fixed.
Tata Motors confirmed to TechCrunch that all the reported flaws were fixed in 2023 but would not say if it notified affected customers that their information was exposed.
“We can confirm that the reported flaws and vulnerabilities were thoroughly reviewed following their identification in 2023 and were promptly and fully addressed,” said Tata Motors communications head Sudeep Bhalla, when contacted by TechCrunch.
“Our infrastructure is regularly audited by leading cybersecurity firms, and we maintain comprehensive access logs to monitor for unauthorized activity. We also actively collaborate with industry experts and security researchers to strengthen our security posture and ensure timely mitigation of potential risks,” said Bhalla.
A recent security analysis has uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the infotainment systems of KIA vehicles, raising alarm across the automotive cybersecurity community.
These flaws allow attackers to inject and execute malicious code through specially crafted PNG image files, potentially compromising vehicle safety and user privacy.
Security researchers, during an in-depth examination of KIA’s head unit and its underlying Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), found that the infotainment firmware failed to properly validate certain image file formats—most notably PNG files.
By exploiting this weakness, attackers could embed executable payloads inside images that, when processed by the infotainment system, triggered remote code execution.
he attack leverages a buffer overflow vulnerability in the image parsing library used by KIA’s infotainment system.
When a malicious PNG file is loaded—either via USB, Bluetooth, or over-the-air update—the system’s parser mishandles the image data, allowing the attacker’s code to overwrite critical memory regions.
Attack Chain
An easy phishing attack using a Flipper Zero device can lead to compromising Tesla accounts, unlocking cars, and starting them. The attack works on the latest Tesla app, version 4.30.6, and Tesla software version 11.1 2024.2.7.
Toyota Motor Corporation disclosed a data breach on its cloud environment that exposed the car-location information of 2,150,000 customers for ten years, between November 6, 2013, and April 17, 2023.
