One of India’s largest motorcycle manufacturers, Suzuki Motorcycle India suffered a cyber attack that forced the company to temporarily halt production at its factories.
According to Autocar India, the company decided to temporarily suspend operations on May 10 which delayed the production of about 20,000 vehicles. It has also been reported that due to an “unprecedented business requirement,” Suzuki has postponed its annual supplier conference that was scheduled this week.
Acknowledging that the company suffered a cyber security incident, a Suzuki Motorcycle India spokesperson said, “We are aware of the incident and have promptly reported the same to the concerned Government department. The matter is currently under investigation, and for security purposes, we are unable to provide further details at this point in time.”
The company is yet to share information about which threat group is behind the cyber attack or the nature and scope of the same. It has also not commented on how threat actors infiltrated its internal systems and if any data has been compromised during the security incident. Some news reports, however, claim that Suzuki Motorcycle India is planning to resume its operations as soon as possible.
In 2020, Suzuki Motorcycle’s sister company Maruti Suzuki suffered a data security incident after it misconfigured a Microsoft Azure Blob cloud storage server, leaking investors’ personal and financial data online in the process.
An Australia-based security expert, Sami Toivonen confirmed that the exposed database was accessible via the Internet for more than a year.
“I contacted Maruti Suzuki via their contact email address, investor relations email address and Twitter account and sent the detailed report to their data protection officer and chief information security officer. On October 26, I contacted Maruti Suzuki for the fourth time. The data was secured later in the day,” said Toivonen.
“One of the datasets contained the personal details of 20,534 investors. From a privacy and data protection point of view, some of the investor documents included sensitive data and information that is meant to be shared only with shareholders. There were over 20 files with investor details, but only one of those files included the PAN numbers, dates of birth, and Aadhaar numbers,” Toivonen added.
