People who dealt with the airline between 26th Aug 2011 and 3rd Feb 2021 were affected.
New Delhi:
Ten years’ worth of customer data including credit cards, passports and phone numbers has been leaked in a massive breach at Air India, the airline announced on Friday.
The incident has affected around 45 lakh customers, Air India said, disclosing the scale of the breach three months after it was first informed of it.
“SITA PSS our data processor of the passenger service system (which is responsible for storing and processing of personal information of the passengers) had recently been subjected to a cybersecurity attack leading to personal data leak of certain passengers. This incident affected around 4,500,000 data subjects in the world,” Air India said in an email to customers.
“While we had received the first notification in this regard from our data processor on 25.02.2021, we would like to clarify that the identity of the affected data subjects was only provided to us by our data processor on 25.03.2021 and 5.04.2021,” it added.
Air India data breached in a major Cyber attack. Breach involves Passengers personal Information including Credit Card Info and Passport Details. Other Global Airlines are likely affected too.#airindia#CyberAttack@airindiain@rahulkanwal@[email protected]/XxUORgInJQ
— Jiten Jain (@jiten_jain) May 21, 2021
“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.
Air India said it had launched an investigation into the incident and took steps including sSecuring the compromised servers, engaging external specialists of data security incidents, contacting credit card issuers and resetting passwords of its frequent flyer programme.
