Cathay Pacific Airways said on Wednesday that its computer systems faced cyber-attack and attackers accessed data of 9 million plus passengers.
The global airline company said that unidentified cyber attackers have accessed data of about 9.4 million passengers of Cathay Pacific Airways and its unit Hong Kong Dragon Airlines without authorisation, Reuters reported.
Cathay Pacific Airways said cyber attackers have accessed 860,000 passport numbers, about 245,000 Hong Kong identity card numbers, 403 expired credit card numbers and 27 credit card numbers with no card verification value (CVV) in the data breach.
The company said it initially discovered suspicious activity on its network in March 2018 and investigations in early May confirmed that certain personal data had been accessed.
Accessed data includes names of passengers, their nationalities, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email and physical addresses, passport numbers, identity card numbers and historical travel information, the company said in a statement.
It added that the Hong Kong Police had been notified about the breach and that there is no evidence that any personal information has been misused.
IT focus of Cathay Pacific
Cathay Pacific, an international airline, is using Red Hat solutions and services to transform its legacy infrastructure into a modern hybrid cloud architecture.
Cathay Pacific is also using AWS machine learning services.
Cathay Pacific is also a customer of Alibaba Group. Cathay Pacific is using Alibaba’s travel services, cloud computing and payments.
Alibaba Cloud supports Cathay Pacific with its cloud computing services, powered by its data centers and global network resources in 14 regions.
Cathay Pacific has adopted security and data protection consultancy services from Alibaba to protect its operations in China.
Alipay, an online and mobile payment platform operated by Ant Financial, will work with Cathay Pacific to explore payment service options at different touch points along the passenger journey.
Cathay Pacific and its rewards programme, Asia Miles, launched their application of smart blockchain technology in a marketing campaign, in collaboration with IT services company Accenture.
