Air India Servers Hacked, 45 Lakh Credit Card, Passport Details Leaked

New Delhi: The national carrier on Friday said in a statement that the servers of Air India were recently hacked, leading to the unethical access of personal information related to scores of passengers. The information stored on the passenger service system includes credit card and passport details.

According to the airline, the cyberattack on Air India has affected the data of around 45 lakh flyers around the world.

A statement issued by Air India said that their 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 admitting that details of credit card have also been breached, the airline clarified that the CVV/CVC numbers, which are key to execute transactions, were not held by its data processor.

Air India stated that the breach involved personal data registered between 26th August 2011 and 20th February 2021, with details that included name, date of birth, contact information, passport information, ticket information, Star Alliance and Air India frequent flyer data as well as credit cards data. In respect of this last type of data, CVV/CVC numbers are not held by their data processor.

"It had received the first notification related to the data breach from its data processor on February 25, 2021. However, the identity of affected data subjects was provided on March 25 and May 4," the state-owned flight operator further said.

According to the statement, the identity of the affected data subjects was only provided to them by their data processor on March 25 and April 5 while they had received the first notification in this regard from their data processor on February 2.

Air India also said that it is following measures to ensure safety of data, and has begun investigating into the data security incident. The airline is also securing compromised servers, engaging external specialists of data security incidents, notifying and liaising with credit card issuers and resetting passwords of Air India frequent flyer programme.

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