LONDON – Scandinavian Airlines has issued a release confirming that it was the subject of a cyberattack earlier this week. On Wednesday 14, the carrier’s website and mobile app suffered an outage which Scandinavian now confirms was a cyberattack.
The airline advised that during the outage which lasted a few hours, some passenger data became visible to other passengers who were active during the ongoing attack.
Scandinavian has reassured passengers that, with respect to possible breach of private information, only limited credit card information was visible. The airline states that “we can confirm that the affected passengers’ contact details, previous and upcoming flights, as well the last four digits of the credit card number were visible.”
“We can reassure passengers who are worried that their credit card information has spread, that only the last four digits of the credit card number have been visible.”
“There has been no risk that this information could be exploited. No passport details have been shared and no EuroBonus points should be affected.”
The statement went on to warn that similar attacks often come in batches and that more attacks are likely to come in the near future. However, the airline reassures that this should not impact any passenger data.
“We always cooperate with the national CAA (Civil Aviation Agency), police, and security police when security matters are concerned – irrespective of the issue in question.”
“We are monitoring the situation closely and continue the work to analyze and evaluate the attack and related consequences, as well as take preventive measures,” the statement concludes.
Recent disruptions to German airports
Yesterday, Thursday 17 February, German news sources carried the story that the websites of several German airports had suffered outages earlier that morning.
Düsseldorf, Hanover, Dortmund, Erfurt, Nuremberg and Baden-Baden airports all suffered outages in on Thursday morning.
The Spiegel Online report speculated that these outages may have been caused by a form of cyber-attack called a “DDoS attack”, however no conclusive finding has yet been formally declared.
DDoS attacks, or Denial of Service attacks, are a method of disruption involving the targeting of a computer system by flooding it with messages or connection requests.
Summary
The cause of the outages at Germany’s airports has not yet been formally confirmed. There is no reported connection between these outages and the attack suffered by Scandinavian Airlines on Wednesday this week.
The Swedish public broadcaster SVT and news agency TT also suffered from website disruptions during Wednesday’s attacks.
