A white hat hacker breached Toyota's global supplier management web portal, gaining read-and-write access to 14,000 corporate email accounts, associated confidential documents, projects, supplier rankings, comments, and other information.
Eaton Zveare, a 29-year-old hacker-hobbyist in Sarasota, Fla., notified the automaker of the breach in November and it was quickly closed.
"Toyota takes cyber threats very seriously. We regularly test our systems and also run a coordinated disclosure program to allow security researchers to report vulnerabilities," Corey Proffitt, Toyota Connected North America's senior communication manager, said in an email to Automotive News.
"We appreciate the research performed by Eaton. We promptly remediated the reported vulnerability and confirmed that there was no evidence of malicious access to Toyota systems."
Toyota Motor Corp.'s employees and suppliers access the company's Global Supplier Preparation Information Man…