India’s newest airline- Akasa air suffered a data breach involving the database of its passengers on August 25. In an announcement on Sunday, the airline said that it has self-reported the incident to the nodal agency tasked to deal with incidents of cyber security threats like hacking and phishing, CERT-In.
“A temporary technical configuration error related to our login and sign-up service was reported to us on Thursday, August 25, 2022,” the company said.
Important update from Akasa Air: https://t.co/LZCNSlexnH
— Akasa Air (@AkasaAir) August 28, 2022
Akasa Air said that due to the error some unauthorized individuals might have viewed the names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers of registered user information. The company further confirmed that no travel-related information, travel records, or payment information was compromised.
“As a result of this configuration error, some Akasa Air registered user information limited to names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers may have been viewed by unauthorized individuals. We can confirm that aside from the above details, no travel-related information, travel records, or payment information was compromised,” an official statement from the airline read.
The communication added that on being made aware of this, we immediately stopped this unauthorized access by completely shutting down the associated functional elements of our system. Subsequently, having added additional controls to address this situation, we have resumed our login and sign-up services.
The airline also sent emails on Saturday and Sunday to its passengers who had registered with the airline and shared their personal details. They also stopped login and sign-up services during the breach period which were later resumed again to be available to new users.
Akasa Air started operations on August 7 and now flies on three routes — Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Bengaluru-Kochi, and Bengaluru-Mumbai. The carrier currently has three planes and plans to add one new aircraft every two weeks and its fleet size will be 18 aircraft by the end of March 2023. In the coming four years, the airline aims to add 54 additional aircraft, taking its total fleet size to 72 planes.
