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EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

bbc.co.uk

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Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#21

Post by martimarkov »

Having worked with EJ I just wanted to point out their system are insanely fragile. They never notified us about breaking changes and the system itself would go down multiple times. There was no CS when something goes wrong. And this was their B2B api. And from talking to ppl who were working in EJ a lot of things were being done on excel spreadsheets and emailed across.

Just wanted to give this info as a sort of reference. I remember when I first found out how they worked that I was so shocked that it wasn’t more of public knowledge

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#22

Post by kryogen1c »

stories like this make me so sad.

its so clearly a result of the race-to-the-bottom system for journalism. theres a single word quoted from an unlisted source. how did we all get here? this is out of the BBC for christs sake.

who's more foolish? the fool, or the fool who follows him?

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#23

Post by jimkleiber »

morsch wrote: post #19

Any customer data, and especially PII, needs to be toxic. The toxicity needs to increase super-linearly with the total amount of data, because the value of leak does, too, while the difficulty of the breach probably does not. It needs to be so expensive to store extensive data of millions of people that companies (or for that matter, the government) cannot wait to get rid of it. Currently, most online shops nudge me…

I built an app back in 2012 for emotional journaling and I tried to collect as little data as possible from the user because I didn’t want to have the burden and legal responsibility to guard all that deep data. Many people in SV told me I was crazy not to collect data. It does make it harder to develop the app with so much uncertainty about how people are using it, yet I felt much more free knowing I wasn’t one hack away from exposing people’s lives.

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#24

Post by Nextgrid »

matteuan wrote: post #10
eddieoz wrote: post #2

But they didn't reveal any details about it. They just told it was a highly sophisticated cyberattack. Guess?

My guess is that some higher-up employee clicked on a bonus.pdf.exe and that's it

covid19 layoffs.docx.exe

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#25

Post by dazc »

mindracer wrote: post #12
88840-8855 wrote: post #4

Could be catastrophic, as I have my ID details saved there for quick checkin.

Me too, could be a lot of passports being cancelled and reissued shortly

Cancelling and renewing a passport is not a trivial matter either.

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#26

Post by Nextgrid »

morsch wrote: post #19

Any customer data, and especially PII, needs to be toxic. The toxicity needs to increase super-linearly with the total amount of data, because the value of leak does, too, while the difficulty of the breach probably does not. It needs to be so expensive to store extensive data of millions of people that companies (or for that matter, the government) cannot wait to get rid of it. Currently, most online shops nudge me…

Collecting data is just a symptom of a bigger disease called "marketing". You eradicate that disease and suddenly there's no reason to collect more data than necessary, along with a near-infinite list of other quality of life improvements like the lack of dark patterns, email and push spam ("newsletters" and "offers" as they call them), etc.

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#27

Post by shakna »

kryogen1c wrote: post #22

stories like this make me so sad. its so clearly a result of the race-to-the-bottom system for journalism. theres a single word quoted from an unlisted source. how did we all get here? this is out of the BBC for christs sake. who's more foolish? the fool, or the fool who follows him?

The official incident notice is here [0].

> Following discussions with the Information Commissioner's Office ("ICO"), the Board of easyJet announces that it has been the target of an attack from a highly sophisticated source.

[0] https://otp.investis.com/clients/uk/easyjet1/rns/regulatory-...

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#28

Post by Nextgrid »

mindracer wrote: post #12
88840-8855 wrote: post #4

Could be catastrophic, as I have my ID details saved there for quick checkin.

Me too, could be a lot of passports being cancelled and reissued shortly

Why would reissuing passports help? The old passport is still valid and only the government is actually able to tell whether it's cancelled (as they have access to the passport DB), but for all other intents and purposes (identity verification for banks, etc) the other passport still appears perfectly valid.

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#29

Post by mFixman »

malux85 wrote: post #3

If EasyJets systems are anything like their customer service, their in-flight food, their baggage handling or their scheduling, this is not surprising.

Hey now, EasyJet's in flight food is actually really good.

I always found it interesting how they have much better tea than British Airways.

Re: EasyJet admits a cyber-attack has affected approximately nine million customers

#30

Post by helsinkiandrew »

kryogen1c wrote: post #22

stories like this make me so sad. its so clearly a result of the race-to-the-bottom system for journalism. theres a single word quoted from an unlisted source. how did we all get here? this is out of the BBC for christs sake. who's more foolish? the fool, or the fool who follows him?

What's your problem with it?

The original story was broken by Reuters: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-easyjet-cyber/easyjet-hit-...

Easyjet have reported the problem to the LSE:

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/news/market-new...

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