Huge breach affects 9 million Cathay Pacific customers

Airlines aren’t having a good time of things at the moment. Even if you managed to dodge the recent British Airways fallout, you may well be caught up in the latest breach affecting no fewer than 9 million customers of Cathay Pacific.

So what was taken? The impact this time around isn’t so much where payment information is concerned, as the 403 credit card numbers the hackers grabbed had all expired, and the 27 live ones had no CVV stored. It isn’t even passwords, as the airline claims none of those were grabbed. The issue is that the hackers took 860,000 passport numbers, 240 Hong Kong identity cards, and all personal data that goes with it.

Here’s what the criminals ran away with in the Cathay Pacific breach: PII. Namely: nationality, date of birth, name, address, email, telephone numbers, frequent flyer membership numbers, customer service remarks, and “historical travel information.” The data accessed from passenger to passenger varies, so there’ll be some with almost nothing to worry about and others wondering how they drew several short straws simultaneously.