Navigation
Search
|
A Luggage Service's Web Bugs Exposed the Travel Plans of Every User
Saturday August 2, 2025. 02:02 AM , from Slashdot
![]() Airportr's CEO Randel Darby confirmed CyberX9's findings in a written statement provided to WIRED but noted that Airportr had disabled the vulnerable part of its site's backend very shortly after the researchers made the company aware of the issues last April and fixed the problems within a few day. 'The data was accessed solely by the ethical hackers for the purpose of recommending improvements to Airportr's security, and our prompt response and mitigation ensured no further risk,' Darby wrote in a statement. 'We take our responsibilities to protect customer data very seriously.' CyberX9's researchers, for their part, counter that the simplicity of the vulnerabilities they found mean that there's no guarantee other hackers didn't access Airportr's data first. They found that a relatively basic web vulnerability allowed them to change the password of any user to gain access to their account if they had just the user's email address -- and they were also able to brute-force guess email addresses with no rate limitations on the site. As a result, they could access data including all customers' names, phone numbers, home addresses, detailed travel plans and history, airline tickets, boarding passes and flight details, passport images, and signatures. By gaining access to an administrator account, CyberX9's researchers say, a hacker could also have used the vulnerabilities it found to redirect luggage, steal luggage, or even cancel flights on airline websites by using Airportr's data to gain access to customer accounts on those sites. The researchers say they could also have used their access to send emails and text messages as Airportr, a potential phishing risk. Airportr tells WIRED that it has 92,000 users and claims on its website that it has handled more than 800,000 bags for customers. The researchers found that they could monitor their browser's communications as they signed up for Airportr and created a new password, and then reuse an API key intercepted from those communications to instead change another user's password to anything they chose. The site also lacked a 'rate limiting' security measure that would prevent automated guesses of email addresses to rapidly change the password of every user's account. And the researchers were also able to find email addresses of Airportr administrators that allowed them to take over their accounts and gain their privileges over the company's data and operations. 'Anyone would have been able to gain or might have gained absolute super-admin access to all the operations and data of this company,' says Himanshu Pathak, CyberX9's founder and CEO. 'The vulnerabilities resulted in complete confidential private information exposure of all airline customers in all countries who used the service of this company, including full control over all the bookings and baggage. Because once you are the super-admin of their most sensitive systems, you have have the ability to do anything.' Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/01/219227/a-luggage-services-web-bugs-exposed-the-travel-plans-...
Related News |
25 sources
Current Date
Aug, Sat 2 - 14:56 CEST
|