Air India on Friday revealed that the private data of 45 lakh customers were leaked in a massive cyberattack in February. The data that has been leaked includes the names, date of birth, contact information and ticket information of the customers registered between 26th August 11 and February 3, 2021. Turns out that Air India is not the only airline company that has been affected by the data breach.
The cyberattack on SITA PSS had impacted the companies including Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Malaysia Airlines, Cathay Pacific, SAS-Scandinavian Airlines, Finland's Finnair, Jeju Air, and Air New Zealand in March. Air India was also one of them, but the company notified its customers about it only in May. This is because SITA, a multinational company that provides services to the air transport industry was subjected to a cyberattack. Almost every airline company flight relies on SITA technology.
SITA had confirmed being a victim of a cyberattack in March and said that it has been involved in a sophisticated attack. "SITA confirms that it was the victim of a cyber-attack, leading to a data security incident involving certain passenger data that was stored on SITA Passenger Service System (US) Inc. servers. Passenger Service System (US) Inc. ("SITA PSS") operates passenger processing systems for airlines.SITA acted swiftly and initiated targeted containment measures. The matter remains under continued investigation by SITA's Security Incident Response Team with the support of leading external experts in cyber-security," the company said in a statement.
Singapore Airlines had said that it does not use the SITA PSS data processor, but the breach has affected some of the flyers. The company had informed the customers about the data leak in March and revealed in a blog that around 580,000 KrisFlyer and PPS members have been affected by the breach of the SITA PSS servers. There is no information about the total number of users' data that was compromised in the data breach. Companies other than Air India, Singapore Airlines have not disclosed the exact figure.
Coming back to Air India, the company revealed that the credit card details of users were compromised but the CVV/CVC numbers of users are safe because it is not held by the data processor.
"The breach involved personal data registered between 26th August 2011 and 3rd February 2021, with details that included name, date of birth, contact information, passport information, ticket information, Star Alliance and Air India frequent flyer data (but no passwords data were affected) as well as credit cards data. However, in respect of this last type of data, CVV/CVC numbers are not held by our data processor," the airline said.