“Very easy” shouts the slightly suspicious gentleman at the back, as this is indeed one of the simplest little targets for hackers to pass a cool evening collecting a bunch of personal information. In fact, while the world shrieks about dubious privacy policies taking advantage of their users or companies failing to provide adequate safety requirements over sensitive information, they lack to notice a gaping security hole in flight booking services. A statement made by investigators at Security Research Labs in Berlin comes to warn the world about how unsafe our details are when booking a flight. So you already know the drill, if you’re planning to travel in the near future or you do it regularly: make sure to enable your VPN while booking.
Personal Information at Your Disposal
According to the official statement, the biggest booking systems lack a “proper way to authenticate air travelers”. This ultimately means that the short code used on many boarding passes are easily hackable, handing in your private and sensitive information to the attackers that can choose to either rob your ID or to goof around and alter your flight details. The hacks can be done via the so-called Passenger Name Records, the six digit pincodes that form the only door between your information and fresh air. These are used to store the booking data with links to travelers’ details such as the personal name, travel dates, course, phone number and email address, credit card number, seat number and a whole lot more.
The three main global distribution systems (GDS) in the world – Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport – are known to manage the majority of travel reservations with flying colors but lack in providing proper safety measure. Experts stated that “while the rest of the internet is debating which second and third factors to use, GDS’ do not offer a first authentication factor“, something more than enough to raise concerns on choosing any of these for traveling means. Moreover, two of the three assign these pincodes sequentially, which only makes brute-force guesses easier as if they were attributed randomly for instance. Passengers’ booking codes can be found online, which brings all this to even darker territory. CheckMyTrip, the curiously twist-of-fate-named Amadeus’ web page, was noted as being particularly vulnerable.
When Staying Home Is Not an Option
If you book your trip with a flight booking service with poor safety and privacy patterns, your best shot will be a VPN. Yes these can’t help much once you submit your information but they’ll surely help you stay under the radar when you are in the process of booking your dream journey. You’ll be protected with military-grade encryptions and designated protocols eradicating the chance of being spotted. Furthermore, besides allowing all sorts of geo-block circumvention, VPNs are very useful for travelers and public Wi-Fi enthusiasts.
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