India’s companies targeted: Air India and Dominos recently breached

The latest hack could cause privacy concerns for over 4,5 million people

Increasing number of cyberattacks on companies based in India raises concern

SITA, a multinational IT company providing various services to the air transport industry, had suffered from a major cyberattack on February 25, 2021.^[1] But the company revealed the magnitude of the incident and its details only within the past two weeks.

Apparently, hackers managed to steal north of 4,5 million passengers' details from the company, which provides its passenger service system Horizon to 90% of the world's airline business. The stolen information included full passenger names, addresses, credit card details, dates of birth, passport information, frequent flyer data, and so on.

It was reported that one of the biggest airlines that took the hit was Air India. However, passenger details of other companies such as Lufthansa, Cathay Pacific, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Finnair, Jeju Air, and Air New Zealand could've also been affected.

According to sources,^[2] the threat actors behind the Air India hack managed to take their hands-on passenger details spanning from 26 August 2011 to 3 February 2021. Thus if you've flown anywhere in the past decade, you should change your frequent flyer account, email, and other passwords, just to be safe.

The cyberattack on Domino's India resulted in 13TB of stolen information

Another major attack has been targetted at Domino's India servers on April 16, 2021. Evildoers have bragged about it on a notorious hackers' forum that they've stolen over 13 TB (that's almost 13,000 gigabytes) of various employee and customer data.

The cybercriminals claimed that they've stolen information stored on servers from 2015 till 2021, and it consists of employee data from Legal, IT, Marketing, and other departments. They've also managed to attain 180 million order details, which included customer names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and credit card details.

Jubilant Foodworks, the parent company of Domino's India, was quick to react to these claims and issued a statement reassuring their customers that their financial records could not have been stolen:^[3]

No data pertaining to financial information of any person was accessed <…> As a policy, we do not store financial details or credit card data of our customers, thus no such information has been compromised.

Unlike the SITA attack, cybercriminals behind the Domino's hack reportedly asked for 50 Bitcoins (around $2 million) for the stolen data. Since hackers have made a website on the darknet, where everyone could check whether their information was stolen, we can assume that the company did the right thing and didn't agree with the assailants' demands.

Enhancing cybersecurity is a must to India and companies based in it

Recent attacks have shown that India's cybersecurity infrastructure needs a significant overhaul. Details of people living in the second-most populous country in the world^[4] with around 1,3 billion people are constantly endangered by cybercriminals seeking to misuse them.

The attacks might be happening because of a lack of cybersecurity awareness, the absence of communication between government institutions, and many other aspects. The country is in desperate need of a cybersecurity upgrade, much like the US did, and is trying to fix things up with the newly issued executive order from President Joe Biden.^[5]

Various countries and companies across the world try to be up-to-date when it comes to threats, breaches, and hacks. Threat actors get advanced and more sophisticated meaning that governments and infrastructures need to do the same. That also means educating your employees besides relying on better cybersecurity solutions.^[6]