SITA, a large data company that partners with some of the world’s largest airlines, announced Thursday that it had been the victim of a “highly sophisticated cyber-attack”, which compromised information on hundreds of thousands of air passengers around the world.
The attack, which took place in February, targeted data stored on SITA’s Passenger Service System servers, which are responsible for storing information related to transactions between carriers and customers. One of the things SITA does is act as a data exchange mechanism between different airlines and help with that ensure that passenger benefits can be used systematically by different carriers.
Understanding what specific data the hackers are accessing is a bit difficult at the moment – although it seems like some of it was information regularly shared with SITA by members of the Star Alliance, the world’s largest global airline alliance.
An airline alliance is basically an industry consortium, and Star’s membership includes some of the world’s leading airlines, including United Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and 23 others. Of those members, several have already come forward to announce breaches related to the attack – and SITA itself would appear to have acknowledged that the parties involved are affiliated with alliance memberships.
An alliance member, Air New Zealand, recently wrote to customers that “some of our customers’ data and that of many other Star Alliance carriers” was affected by the SITA attack. Similarly, Singapore Airlines recently told his customers that some of his data was affected by the breach because “Star Alliance airlines offer a limited number of frequent flyer programs [sic] data to the alliance, which is then forwarded to other member airlines for storage in their respective passenger service systems. “
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It is unclear whether all Star Alliance members have been affected. A representative of SITA TechCrunch told that the infringement “affects several airlines around the world, not just in the United States,” but declined to name them all. We’ve reached out to SITA for comment and will update if they respond.
So far it seems that the nature of the breakthrough is broader than deep. That is, many people seem to be affected, although the data shared with SITA does not seem that extensive in most cases. In the case of Singapore Airlines, for example, more than 500,000 people had their data compromised even though the data doesn’t include things like member travel plans, passwords, or credit card information. The airline has declared
About 580,000 KrisFlyer and PPS members have been affected by the breach of the SITA PSS servers. The information involved is limited to membership number and tier status and, in some cases, membership name, as this is the full extent of the frequent flyer data that Singapore Airlines shares with other Star Alliance carriers for this data transfer.
So … letting a hacker know how often you fly doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? But even if the SITA breach isn’t that extensive, it’s another good example of what kind of problem the third is parties pose for organizations within a supply chain – and what an attractive target they are for hackers. Because of the intricate ways in which personal data is collected, stored and shared, it is incredibly easy for security officers to miss the weakest link in an industry’s chain. On the other hand, it can be incredibly easy for a hacker to spot one.