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I’m sure there’s a story here:
Sources say the man had tailgated his way through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items.
The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes inspected in the usual way.
I just heard about this:
There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline.
First, the scam is possible. I had a bag destroyed by baggage handlers on a recent flight, and all the information I needed to file a claim was on my luggage tag. I have no idea if I will successfully get any money from the airline, or what form it will be in, or how it will be tied to my name, but at least the first step is possible.
But…is it actually happening? No one knows. It feels like a kind of dumb way to make not a lot of money. The origin of this rumor seems to be single Reddit post.
And why should I care about this scam? No one is scamming me; it’s the airline being scammed. I suppose the airline might ding me for reporting a damage bag, but it seems like a very minor risk.
Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it’s used by wealthy or important people. So if the company’s website is insecure, you’d be able to spy on lots of wealthy or important people. And maybe even steal their luggage.
Researchers at the firm CyberX9 found that simple bugs in Airportr’s website allowed them to access virtually all of those users’ personal information, including travel plans, or even gain administrator privileges that would have allowed a hacker to redirect or steal luggage in transit. Among even the small sample of user data that the researchers reviewed and shared with WIRED they found what appear to be the personal information and travel records of multiple government officials and diplomats from the UK, Switzerland, and the US.
“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 [sic] the ability to do anything.”
This is news:
A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.
Another article.
EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Ed Hausbrook reported this a month and a half ago.
Interesting vulnerability:
…a special lane at airport security called Known Crewmember (KCM). KCM is a TSA program that allows pilots and flight attendants to bypass security screening, even when flying on domestic personal trips.
The KCM process is fairly simple: the employee uses the dedicated lane and presents their KCM barcode or provides the TSA agent their employee number and airline. Various forms of ID need to be presented while the TSA agent’s laptop verifies the employment status with the airline. If successful, the employee can access the sterile area without any screening at all.
A similar system also exists for cockpit access, called the Cockpit Access Security System (CASS). Most aircraft have at least one jumpseat inside the cockpit sitting behind the flying pilots. When pilots need to commute or travel, it is not always possible for them to occupy a revenue seat, so a jumpseat can be used instead. CASS allows the gate agent of a flight to verify that the jumpseater is an authorized pilot. The gate agent can then inform the crew of the flight that the jumpseater was authenticated by CASS.
[attack details omitted]
At this point, we realized we had discovered a very serious problem. Anyone with basic knowledge of SQL injection could login to this site and add anyone they wanted to KCM and CASS, allowing themselves to both skip security screening and then access the cockpits of commercial airliners.
We ended up finding several more serious issues but began the disclosure process immediately after finding the first issue.
It’s realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it?
I can’t remember the last time I thought about the US no-fly list: the list of people so dangerous they should never be allowed to fly on an airplane, yet so innocent that we can’t arrest them. Back when I thought about it a lot, I realized that the TSA’s practice of giving it to every airline meant that it was not well protected, and it certainly ended up in the hands of every major government that wanted it.
The list is back in the news today, having been left exposed on an insecure airline computer. (The airline is CommuteAir, a company so obscure that I’ve never heard of it before.)
This is, of course, the problem with having to give a copy of your secret list to lots of people.
EDITED TO ADD (2/14): The 23 yo researcher who found NOFLY.csv wrote a blog post about it. This is not the first time the list has become public.
Two men have been convicted of hacking the taxi dispatch system at the JFK airport. This enabled them to reorder the taxis on the list; they charged taxi drivers $10 to cut the line.
I fly a lot. Over the past five years, my average speed has been 32 miles an hour. That all changed mid-March. It’s been 105 days since I’ve been on an airplane—longer than any other time in my adult life—and I have no future flights scheduled. This is all a prelude to saying that I have been paying a lot of attention to the COVID-related risks of flying.
We know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads than we did in March. The “less than six feet, more than ten minutes” model has given way to a much more sophisticated model involving airflow, the level of virus in the room, and the viral load in the person who might be infected.
Regarding airplanes specifically: on the whole, they seem safer than many other group activities. Of all the research about contact tracing results I have read, I have seen no stories of a sick person on an airplane infecting other passengers. There are no superspreader events involving airplanes. (That did happen with SARS.) It seems that the airflow inside the cabin really helps.
Airlines are trying to make things better: blocking middle seats, serving less food and drink, trying to get people to wear masks. (This video is worth watching.) I’ve started to see airlines requiring masks and banning those who won’t, and not just strongly encouraging them. (If mask wearing is treated the same as the seat belt wearing, it will make a huge difference.) Finally, there are a lot of dumb things that airlines are doing.
This article interviewed 511 epidemiologists, and the general consensus was that flying is riskier than getting a haircut but less risky than eating in a restaurant. I think that most of the risk is pre-flight, in the airport: crowds at the security checkpoints, gates, and so on. And that those are manageable with mask wearing and situational awareness. So while I am not flying yet, I might be willing to soon. (It doesn’t help that I get a -1 on my COVID saving throw for type A blood, and another -1 for male pattern baldness. On the other hand, I think I get a +3 Constitution bonus. Maybe, instead of sky marshals we can have high-level clerics on the planes.)
And everyone: wear a mask, and wash your hands.
EDITED TO ADD (6/27): Airlines are starting to crowd their flights again.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.