Akasa data hacked, airline asks customers to be ‘vigilant against possible phishing attempts' -

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These days, many companies are being listed for bad reviews for online data security management. That’s because of low-level security measures, attackers became more ruthless and spikier towards the weak and innocent.

They’re trying to make more “n” more money whenever they get a chance and since the newer technology is available to everybody, they also get a hand to make possible outcomes without any regret. Most of the time they don’t even leave a single clue behind so that the investigators won’t reach out to them.

India’s newest Airline Akasa Air has been victimized by a data breach that took its first take-off on Aug 7, 2022. Let’s see what was the cause and how did it make it up to the users/ travelers.

Akasa Air, 2022

The breach was “limited to names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers” and “no travel-related information, travel records or payment information was compromised.”

The breach was found by Ashutosh Barot – a Cyber Security expert nicely works in Deloitte Company and does Bug Bounty Hunting to follow his passion. The chronological order of his security flaws discovered in the cyberspace of Akasa Airlines, the latest one in its trade in the Indian subcontinent, is described below:

Initially, Ashutosh employed the recon process to explore the domains, subdomains, and Internet-facing IT infrastructure of Akasa Air, then he detected their registration page. He created a self-profile in it by putting some basic information such as Name, Email Address, Phone Number, Gender, etc. in JSON format.
He altered some mechanisms in the request soon after a while and then he was pretty capable to peek into other users’ PII that sincerely took approx. 30 minutes to find this loophole in the cyberspace of Akasa Air.
As a responsible citizen, Ashutosh drafted the issue over an email after a lot of struggle to find the concerned IT person’s Email ID by asking them for it on DM on Twitter. However, he failed to find out as he didn’t want to send such crucial and sensitive information to the wrong hands that could be exploited.
Moreover, at last, he got this issue resolved which took 2 weeks by Akasa Air.

Without any delay, Akasa Airlines reported this to high command and CERT-In as well as assured them that they don’t have to worry about it too much. The reason they gave was that “a temporary technical configuration error related to our login and sign-up service was reported on Aug 25, 2022.

CERT-In got the report and immediately took action against the crime and advised travelers to be “vigilant against possible phishing attempts, since (their) data may have been accessed as a result of this incident.”

Basically, CERT-In is a government-authorized nodal agency that specifically works to offer help to innocent people with such incidents while there’s no other choice.

“Sometimes the victim doesn’t even know how to react on such an occasion. Mostly try to forget the incident since there’s no comeback for them as they think the clients may have lost their trust in

the victim companies. But the reality is that there’s no way that the company is not going to stand against the attackers. Just there’s a need for expert support.

Previously, various other flight companies have become the victim of such attacks and possibly they faced the same things. Those companies who had lost their data from their database in the past from such attacks were IndiGo, Air India, and SpiceJet.

As a result, some Akasa Airline registered user data included:

Names,
Gender,
Email addresses, and
Phone numbers

Some unauthorized individuals may have been viewed by then. They are assuring the users that aside from the mentioned details, not a single traveling data, travel records/ payment data was breached.”

Airline Clear the Sky, and Said (it took several steps after this hacking)

“On being made aware of the incident, we immediately stopped this unauthorized access by completely shutting down the associated functional elements of our system.

The action was taken by Akasa Airline

They have added more controls to consider this situation. According to them, the login and sign-up services have started once again, and are sorry for the inconvenience. They reported the event to CERT-In.

Moreover, get a glance at some additional reviews to ensure that the security of all systems is enhanced further. In the end, they said “We are continuously stabilizing our systems, which includes guidance from experts and the research community, to make sure they are robust. So, they took great initiative and prepared the best management for further consequences.