The biggest manufacturer of automobiles, Toyota, has discovered unauthorized activity on systems in a few of its Europe & African services.

The ‘Medusa ransomware gang allegedly took data from Toyota Financial Services.’ The group offered the business ten days to provide the $8 million ransom.

Despite being a relatively new threat actor, the Medusa ransomware gang has already established a reputation for using aggressive tactics. The gang has aimed at numerous establishments, including businesses, governmental bodies, and medical service providers.

If victims refuse to pay the ransom, the Medusa ransomware gang has previously threatened to reveal stolen content, including sensitive information. After victims have paid the ransom, the gang has, in certain instances, even released the stolen data.

The Gang Released Sample Data on Its Leak Site

The Medusa gang made claims on their leak site today, November 16, including screenshots of multiple documents confirming the hack’s authenticity and listed stolen sample data.

The files contain several spreadsheets, financial documents, staff email addresses, and scans of a Serbian passport. One document, in particular, contains un-hashed account passwords and usernames for several types of production and development environments, and much more were all included.

A ransomware group claims to have accessed a vast amount of sensitive data from Germany’s Toyota Financial Services.

“Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan,” Medusa’s leak site said. 

“Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 million vehicles per year. The leaked data is from Toyota Financial Services in Germany. Toyota Deutschland GmbH is an affiliated company held by Toyota Motor Europe (TME) in Brussels/Belgium and located in Köln (Cologne).”

The leak site features a countdown to the full data release date of November 26, which is in ten days. The gang will extend the deadline by one day for US$10,000.

The company took a few systems offline to look into this activity and lower risk. They have also started collaborating with law enforcement. They have begun getting their systems back online in the majority of countries.

“We are working diligently to get systems back online as soon as possible and we regret any inconvenience caused to our customers and business partners. As of now, this incident is limited to Toyota Financial Services Europe & Africa”, the company said.

Cybersecurity analyst Kevin Beaumont pointed out that Toyota systems that are reachable online are susceptible to the “Citrix Bleed” vulnerability, which was disclosed late last month and has already impacted numerous major businesses and government agencies.

Over the past three years, the automaker has had to cope with several cybersecurity breaches. One major one that was revealed in May involved the exposure of data on over 2 million Japanese automobiles for more than ten years.

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