Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. has confirmed that thousands of its customers’ information has been compromised following a data breach at its software provider Red Hat in September.
Nissan, a major automaker, reported that it was indirectly impacted by the security incident at the American company Red Hat, which it had hired to develop customer management systems for its sales companies.
Impact on Nissan Customers
Following Red Hat’s notification of unauthorized access to its data servers, Nissan confirmed that the leaked information contained customer data of Nissan Fukuoka Sales Co., Ltd.
Approximately 21,000 customers who purchased vehicles or received services at Nissan in Fukuoka, Japan, had their personal information exposed. The compromised information includes:
- Full names
- Physical addresses
- Telephone numbers
- Email addresses
- Customer data used in sales operations
Nissan clarified that financial information, such as credit card details, was not exposed in the incident.
The Attack on Red Hat and Threat Groups
The Red Hat security breach, disclosed in early October, involved the theft of hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data from 28,000 private GitLab repositories.
The initial attackers were identified as Crimson Collective, a threat group that claimed responsibility for the theft. The ShinyHunters group later became involved by hosting samples of the stolen data on their extortion platform.
Nissan said the compromised Red Hat environment contained no information beyond what was confirmed to be affected and that there is no evidence that the leaked data has been misused so far.
History of Safety Incidents at Nissan
This is the second cybersecurity incident for Nissan Japan in the last year. Previously, the company suffered a Qilin ransomware attack in late August, which affected its design subsidiary Creative Box Inc. (CBI).
Additionally, in recent years, Nissan has faced other significant incidents:
- Nissan North America: Suffered a data breach that affected 53,000 employees.
- Nissan Oceania: Announced that an Akira ransomware attack had exposed the data of 100,000 customers.
This pattern of incidents highlights the need to strengthen supply chain security and overall organizational resilience to persistent threats.