45 lakh Air India passengers personal information leaked in ‘sophisticated cyberattack’

In a massive breach of Air India’s server has left 45,00,000 people personal data compromised. The leaked data was collected between August 26, 2011 and February 20, 2021.

This included people’s personal details like name, date of birth, contact information, passport information, ticket details, credit card data, among others.

The massive data leak was caused by a “sophisticated cyberattack” on Air India’s passenger service system provider SITA.

“While we and our data processor continue to take remedial actions…We would also encourage passengers to change passwords wherever applicable to ensure safety of their personal data,” Air India said in a statement.

AIR India in their statement said “This is to inform that 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”.

“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 & 5.04.2021. The present communication is an effort to apprise of accurate state of facts as on date and to supplement our general announcement of 19th March 2021 initially made via our website”.

“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 statement informed.

We would also like to inform you that the following measures to ensure safety of the data were immediately taken:

• Investigating the data security incident;

• Securing the compromised servers;

• Engaging external specialists of data security incidents;

• Notifying and liaising with the credit card issuers;

• Resetting passwords of Air India FFP program.

Further, our data processor has ensured that no abnormal activity was observed after securing the compromised servers.