Yesterday, Spanish airline Air Europa suffered a cyberattack on its online payment system. The cyber security incident led to some of the airline’s customers’ credit card details being exposed.
Reuters reported the airline has since advised some customers to cancel and replace the card used to pay to “to prevent possible fraudulent use of your information.”
A spokesperson told Airport Technology:
“Our IT team confirmed the existence of a cybersecurity problem that would have affected the payment gateway used to manage purchases through our website. This fraudulent alteration of the payment process would have allowed the leak of credit card data.
There is no evidence that this leak was ultimately used to commit any fraud. The detection and rapid intervention of the team for the deployment of the protocol established in our Response Plan has allowed us to block the security breach and prevent the leakage of new data.”
Air Europa has previously been fined for the mishandling of a different data breach affecting 489,000 customers.
The digital transformation of the industry has propelled aviation forwards, bringing about a host of new opportunities. However, these benefits must be tempered with an awareness of the vulnerabilities that can ensue. In April, Boeing reported occurrences of randsomware in the aviation supply chain rose 600 per cent in one year.
Ransomware, malware, phishing, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are only a few examples of cyberattacks and they pose a very real threat in a digitised industry. To read more about the importance of cybersecurity, read here.
For more like this see:
- Four reasons the aviation industry must take cybersecurity seriously
- Tara Mulrooney, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Innovation at Edmonton International Airport – “The airport’s complex digital backbone.”
- SITA finds aviation CIOs are “ramping up digital technology investments”
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