How the Volkswagen Breach Could Have Been Avoided with AccuKnox

by Atharva Shah | March 25, 2025

The Volkswagen data breach exposed 800,000 EV owners’ sensitive personal data due to an AWS misconfiguration. This blog explores how AccuKnox CNAPP could have prevented it through automated misconfiguration detection, Zero Trust security, and compliance enforcement.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In December 2024, Volkswagen Group experienced a massive data breach, exposing sensitive personal information of approximately 800,000 electric vehicle (EV) owners across its brands, including Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, and Skoda.

The breach, initially reported by Spiegel, was caused by a misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system managed by Volkswagen’s software subsidiary, Cariad. This misconfiguration left personal and location data publicly accessible online for several months.

Key Statistics & Losses

800,000+ individuals affected
Data exposed: Vehicle locations, timestamps of EV activations, email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses
Notable victims: Two German politicians, Hamburg police, and citizens across Germany, Norway, Sweden, UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Denmark
Reported by: Chaos Computer Club (CCC), an ethical hacking organization
Immediate Action: Cariad terminated the access on the same day after CCC’s notification

This breach underscores the dangers of cloud misconfigurations, with AWS serving as a key example in the case of Volkswagen.

What Caused the Breach? The AWS Misconfiguration

Despite AWS offering a secure infrastructure, misconfigurations by end users can expose sensitive data. In Volkswagen’s case, the following issues led to the breach:

Publicly Accessible Amazon S3 Storage: Sensitive data was stored in an S3 bucket with overly permissive access settings, making it susceptible to accidental data leakage or public views.
Lack of Proper IAM Controls: Inadequate Identity and Access Management (IAM) settings may have allowed unauthorized users to access the data.
No Continuous Security Monitoring: The misconfiguration remained undetected for months, highlighting the absence of automated security posture monitoring.

AccuKnox’s Role in Securing AWS Cloud Assets

While AWS provides secure infrastructure, it is not responsible for securing user configurations. This is known as the Shared Responsibility Model—AWS secures the cloud, but customers must secure their workloads. Without a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) like AccuKnox, detecting and remediating such misconfigurations becomes incredibly difficult, especially for global enterprises managing vast cloud infrastructures.

The Challenge of Visibility in Large-Scale Cloud Environments

Volkswagen, like many other global enterprises, operates a highly distributed cloud environment with workloads spread across multiple regions, and accounts.

Pain Points in Cloud Security Management

Challenges	Why It is a Problem	How AccuKnox Helps
Lack of Cloud Asset Visibility	Managing globally distributed assets and databases is difficult, leading to blind spots.	Automates asset discovery across all cloud environments.
Too Many Findings, No Prioritization	Security teams get overwhelmed by alerts.	Uses risk-based prioritization to focus on high-impact misconfigurations first.
Triaging Misconfigurations	It is hard to differentiate between critical and low-risk issues.	Prioritizes misconfigurations based on risk level and recommends fixes.
Manual Compliance Management	Keeping up security frameworks is resource-intensive.	Automates compliance enforcement for AWS such as CIS Benchmarking.

Compliance & Security Frameworks: A Built-in Defense

AccuKnox helps organizations stay compliant with 33+ security frameworks, reducing the risk of breaches by enforcing security best practices by default using eBPF driven zero trust approach.

Key AWS & Industry Compliances Supported by AccuKnox

AWS-Specific
- System calls, network calls and process calls
Industry Standards
- NIST CSF, NIST SP 800-53
- PCI DSS
- SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3
- FedRAMP
- GDPR (EU)
- HIPAA, HITRUST CSF

Why does Compliance Matter?

Ensures data protection and regulatory compliance
Prioritizes risks and enables mitigation
Help companies avoid penalties and reputational damage

With AccuKnox’s Compliance Dashboard, Volkswagen could have detected the AWS misconfiguration before it led to a breach.

How AccuKnox Could Have Prevented This Breach

If Volkswagen had implemented on-prem AccuKnox’s CNAPP, it could have proactively detected the misconfigured public S3 bucket before it led to a data breach. AccuKnox provides real-time monitoring of cloud assets, ensuring organizations have full visibility into their cloud environments and can quickly identify security gaps. With automated risk-based prioritization, AccuKnox helps teams to focus on critical misconfigurations first, preventing sensitive data from being exposed due to drift and misconfigurations. Additionally, AccuKnox enforces Zero Trust Security by locking down over-permissive IAM roles, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Its automated compliance management ensures organizations stay aligned with security standards like AWS CIS, NIST, and PCI DSS. With seamless integration across AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid environments. AccuKnox can enable companies like Volkswagen to maintain a secure, compliant, and resilient cloud infrastructure—avoiding breaches before they happen.

By leveraging AccuKnox, Volkswagen could have avoided the breach, protected 800,000+ customers effortlessly.

AWS Security Scenarios with AccuKnox

If you have AWS Cloud Accounts that you wish to secure via AccuKnox SaaS, check out the Onboarding AWS Cloud Account Documentation.

AccuKnox finds critical issues from your codebase and highlights threat priority along with proposing a solution. Exposed S3 secret keys in EC2 and S3 buckets with disabled ACLS on AWS and other cloud platforms.

1. S3 Public Exposure

Identification

To identify publicly exposed S3 buckets:

Navigate to Issues > Findings.
Apply the Cloud Findings filter.
Search for the keyword public.
Group by Findings to see all public exposure cases.

Impact

Attackers can enumerate publicly exposed buckets to identify accessible data.
Once an exposed bucket is identified, attackers can perform fuzzing against the bucket URL to extract sensitive information.

Remediation

AccuKnox provides solution reference links to assist in remediation.
To remediate the findings:

Navigate to Issues > Findings.
Select the finding and create a ticket for remediation.

2. Open SSH Exposure

Identification

To identify publicly exposed SSH ports:

Navigate to Issues > Findings.
Apply the Cloud Findings filter.
Search for the keyword public.
Group by Findings to see all open SSH exposure cases.

Impact

If an EC2 instance is misconfigured, an attacker can gain control over resources. Exposure, combined with poor authentication, allows attackers to perform brute force attacks using tools such as:

Nmap:

nmap -p 22 --script ssh-brute --script-args userdb=users.lst,passdb=pass.lst
 
--script-args ssh-brute.timeout=4s <target>

Metasploit:

msf > use auxiliary/scanner/ssh/ssh_login
   
msf auxiliary(ssh_login) > set RHOSTS <target>
      
msf auxiliary(ssh_login) > set USERPASS_FILE
   
/usr/share/metasploit-framework/data/wordlists/root_userpass.txt
      
msf auxiliary(ssh_login) > set PASSWORD
    
/usr/share/metasploit-framework/data/wordlists/rockyou.txt   Run

Hydra:

hydra -L /usr/share/wordlists.rockyou.txt -P /usr/share/wordlists/rocky

Remediation

AccuKnox provides solution reference links to assist in remediation.
To remediate the findings:

Navigate to Issues > Findings.
Select the finding and create a ticket for remediation.

Key Lessons

Do not wait for a breach to happen. Secure your cloud workloads with AccuKnox today. Had Volkswagen used AccuKnox CNAPP, the breach could have been prevented—protecting customer data, avoiding regulatory fines, and maintaining brand reputation.

AWS security is a shared responsibility—end users must configure and secure their cloud assets properly.
Misconfigurations remain one of the biggest threats—as seen in this breach.
Visibility & automation are essential for securing cloud workloads across varying environments.
AccuKnox CNAPP SaaS provides an end-to-end solution for cloud misconfiguration detection, compliance, and automated remediation.

You can protect your workloads and achieve runtime security using AccuKnox. AccuKnox CNAPP secures your Kubernetes and other cloud workloads using Kernel Native Primitives such as AppArmor, SELinux, and eBPF. Reach out to us for additional guidance in planning your cloud security program.