2 min read
It’s the holiday period and everyone is going somewhere; meeting relatives, vacation, trips, etc, and it seems like your social media newsfeed and snapchat stories are bulging with people sharing pictures of their tickets and boarding passes. It’s one of the favorite things to do, especially for millennials, to show off and share about their upcoming holiday adventures with their friends as they wait for their flight. But here’s a piece of advice, don’t ever lose your boarding pass or share the picture of your boarding pass, not on Facebook, not on Snapchat, not even with your friends.
The boarding pass has a barcode that contains really sensitive information about you, and can be used to cause some serious harm in the future. If anyone has access to that barcode, they can find out almost everything about your trip; passenger’s name, frequent flyer number, current and future flights linked to that frequent flyer number. Once accessed, the account can be used to change seats, or even cancel any future flights.
This truckload of sensitive information can be accessed simply through a picture of your boarding pass, as demonstrated by a reader of a blog on cyber security, Cory. Cory took a screenshot of a Lufthansa Airline boarding pass of a friend from Facebook, the largest airline in Europe. After finding a site that could decode the data, he managed to access all the basic information like the passenger’s name and the frequent flyer number.
“Besides his name, frequent flyer number and other [personally identifiable information], I was able to get his record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the Lufthansa flight he was taking that day,” Cory said. “I then proceeded to Lufthansa’s website and using his last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to his entire account. Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.”
So if you would like to keep your privacy, we suggest not sharing a picture of your boarding pass at all, or even if you want to, you should blur the sensitive information. Even once you are done with it, you should shred or tear the boarding pass instead of throwing it away.
Source- KrebsOnSecurity
