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.

Lovable is accused of failing to fix security flaws that exposed information about users, a growing vulnerability as vibe coding’s popularity surges.

Lovable, the popular vibe coding app that describes itself as the fastest-growing company in Europe, has failed to fix a critical security flaw, despite being notified about it months ago, according to a new report by an employee at a competitor.

The service offered by Lovable, a Swedish startup that bills its product as “the last piece of software,” allows customers without any technical training to instantly create websites and apps using only natural language prompts.

The employee at AI coding assistant company Replit who wrote the report, reviewed by Semafor, says he and a colleague scanned 1,645 Lovable-created web apps that were featured on the company’s site. Of those, 170 allowed anyone to access information about the site’s users, including names, email addresses, financial information and secret API keys for AI services that would allow would-be hackers to run up charges billed to Lovable’s customers.

The vulnerability, which was made public on the National Vulnerabilities Database on Thursday, highlights a growing security problem as artificial intelligence allows anyone to become a software developer. Each new app or website created by novices is a potential sitting duck for hackers with automated tools that target everything connected to the internet. The advent of amateur vibe coding raises new questions about who is responsible for securing consumer products in an era where developers with zero security know-how can build them.

Fortinet released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in FortiOS, including a high-severity code execution security issue.

Salt Labs researchers identified generative AI ecosystems as a new interesting attack vector. vulnerabilities found during this research on ChatGPT ecosystem could have granted access to accounts of users, including GitHub repositories, including 0-click attacks.

Atlassian has released software fixes to address four critical flaws in its software that could lead to remote code execution.

Some foreign companies may be complying—potentially offering China’s spies hints for hacking their customers.