British Airways; customer data theft might be much bigger than originally thought

by Crew Daily 26th October 2018, 12:14 pm 260 Views

A British Airways aircraft taxis past other parked British Airways aircraft at Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport in west London, on July 30, 2010. British Airways said on Friday its net losses widened to 122 million pounds in its first quarter as strike action and the volcanic ash cloud grounded flights but insisted it was set to break even. BA, which is looking to merge with Spain's Iberia, said losses after tax rose 15 percent to the equivalent of 146 million euros or 191 million dollars in the three months to June compared with a year earlier. AFP PHOTO/ BEN STANSALL (Photo credit should read BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images)

On October 25^th, 2018; British Airways released a statement and an alarming news about further updates on the previously theft of its customer data. The news stated that on top of the already 380,000 credit card’s data theft another 185,000 people are affected too. The news of the first theft was made by British Airways on September 6^th, 2018.

The British Airways statement stated, “Airline is currently working in combined efforts with the specialists of Cyber Forensic Investigators and the National Crime Agency to unravel the data theft. As a result of concluding our internal investigation, we are updating our customers with more information.”

The investigation has revealed that hackers might have stolen an additional personal data for about 77000 customers of the airlines. The personal data which might have been compromised includes things like

Names
Billing address
Email address
Card payment information
Card number
Expiry date of cards
CVV

An additional data of about 108,000 customers might have been compromised with CVV. The victims of the theft are potentially those customers who made their reward bookings in between April 21^st to July 28^th, 2018 and have used cards to make the payments.

The airline has also stated that they do not have conclusive evidence to support the fact as if the data was stolen entirely from British Airways’ own system or not. However, they are still doing all their best to track down the source of this threat. The airline has also precaution their customers to contact their bank or card providers as a safety measure.

Lastly, airline has released the news that the Customers who are not contacted by Airlines until Friday 26^th, 2018 at 1700 GMT do not need to take any precautionary measure.