CyberSecurity Data Breach: British Airways Data Breach Exposed Customers

Earlier first week of September 2018, British Airways confessed to a sad incident that appeared somewhat similar to the Air Canada data breach.  According to their report, unknown attackers managed to pilfer a large chunk of customer data from the airline’s app. 

Specifically, they successfully stole data of 380,000 customers including their payment card details. Since fixing the British Airways data breach, the officials have apologized to their customers. They also offer compensation to the victims suffering possible financial losses.

According to what Mr. Alex Cruz said to the BBC, the airline suffered a suspicious Cybercrime that let the attackers pilfer customers’ data. As stated on their website, the recent British Airways data breach has affected the customers who visited BA between August 21, 2018, and September 5, 2018, regarding new bookings, or changing the previous ones. The count of affected reportedly reached up to 380,000 customers.

After determining the extent of the breach, they began contacting the affected BA customers. A good thing is that BA has pledged to compensate for any potential financial losses to the customers.

Fig 1.1- British Airways

Data breaches are indeed becoming the “new normal”, even if it is about the airlines. Not much time has passed since when we reported about the Air Canada data breach. Like this BA’s incident, that too happened through the mobile app. But the extent of the breach was lower.

British Airways has been “working continuously with specialist cyber forensic investigators and the National Crime Agency to investigate fully the data theft”, IAG added.

However, British Airways said it has not yet received any verified reports of fraud in relation to the data breach.

The exponential rise in the occurrence of data breaches around the world certainly raises questions over the current cybersecurity practices. The more the organizations claim to have robust data security, higher is the frequency of data breaches. Most of the times, the attackers remain “unknown”. In case of the recent British Airways data breach as well, the attackers remain unidentified yet.