Four used Tesla vehicle components unearthed on eBay by a cybersecurity expert still contained personal information related to their former owners. The ethical hacker GreenTheOnly informed the automaker of his discovery but received no response.
The company had also taken no measures to correct the problem this Sunday, reports the InsideEVs site .
Addresses, passwords, telephone directory
The equipment affected by the flaw is the MCU (Media Control Unit) or ICE calculators that equip the on-board system of the brand's electric cars. The second type of equipment manages both the entertainment offer and the automatic driving device of Tesla cars. The hacker noticed the presence of information on Model X and Model 3 boxes.
On these computers, GreenTheOnly was able to recover the home and office addresses of the previous owners, cookies from Netflix or Spotify sessions, the passwords for the Wi-Fi connections used and items entered in the smartphones associated with the device. For example the call list, the address book or the timetable.
On sale on the second hand market
The hacker points to the responsibility of the Tesla services in charge of updating and replacing the boxes. The equipment in question had indeed been put on sale after the owners replaced their system. It is therefore the manufacturer who was responsible for erasing the data after having transferred it to his client's new computer. Once the box is disconnected, the user can no longer remove the information himself.
GreenTheOnly judges the situation all the more worrying as many second-hand MCU or ICE units are on sale. Tesla indeed gets rid of it according to a process that the company did not want to specify. Employees would, however, sometimes simply hammer the computers to make them unusable.
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