Vacationers’ could be set for utter travel chaos which will see planes grounded and passengers’ names switched on tickets.
That’s the warning from a cyber-security expert who said airlines are using booking systems that could be breached by hackers, potentially ruining millions of holidays.
Andrey Nikishin, cyber security expert at Kaspersky, told The Sun Online that “three computer systems are responsible for booking the majority of all airline trips worldwide and are each vulnerable to exposing passenger information due to several legacy flaws”.
He added: “Modern airline organizations are not just made up of a bunch of planes and thousands of employees; they include a large IT infrastructure that supports all of the internal and external operations from ticket booking to passengers’ baggage handling.
“Thirty to forty years ago most of the operations were not computerized and instead were handled the old fashioned paper way, however today most or all of the operations are paperless and digitized.
“As a result an airline heavily depends on on reliability and stability of IT infrastructure and thus we as passengers depend on airline IT as well.
“All of the airlines use similar software and hardware by purpose but slightly different in nature, so when a merger of two airlines takes place there is two sets of IT systems that serve the same task.
“Of course, in order to increase the efficiency of a joint company it is absolutely crucial to get rid of duplicating functions and I should say that this is a very hard archive task for IT personnel.”
There are three major booking system providers that the majority of airlines used.
Just last week American Airlines flights were halted after a booking system glitch.
“As a result an airline heavily depends on on reliability and stability of IT infrastructure and thus we as passengers depend on airline IT as well.
“All of the airlines use similar software and hardware by purpose but slightly different in nature, so when a merger of two airlines takes place there is two sets of IT systems that serve the same task.
“Of course, in order to increase the efficiency of a joint company it is absolutely crucial to get rid of duplicating functions and I should say that this is a very hard archive task for IT personnel.”
In some cases passengers have been left stranded for hours on the runway after hackers got into the airline’s systems.
Security experts have claimed that they contain back doors for hackers to access passenger and flight information.
These vulnerabilities could allow hackers to alter flight information, causing huge delays and in some recent cases, have managed to ground flights.
Name changes on tickets could pose serious security risks as well as airlines try to crack down on terrorist threats.
Nikishin added: “The technologies used nowadays are outdated as they were designed many years ago before devices were connected to the internet, or even before the internet was mainstream.
“In addition to security implications as a result of business change such as mergers, the critical industries (transport, telecommunications, industrial companies etc) are by nature at a greater risk of cyber-attack.”
This article originally appeared on The Sun.
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