Popular Flight Tracker Flightradar24 suffers Security Breach

The security breach was limited to only one of its servers

It has been reported that one of the world's most popular flight tracking services Flightradar24, which shows real-time aircraft flight information on a map, has suffered a massive data breach that may have compromised email addresses and hashed passwords for more than 230,000 customers.

Without revealing any information about the breach publicly via their blog or social media accounts, Flightradar24 started sending out emails earlier this week with a password reset link, asking them to change their passwords. The Swedish-based company confirmed that the security breach was limited to only one of its servers, which has been shut down immediately after the intrusion was detected late last week.

Adam Brown, manager of security solutions at Synopsys, said: "If Flightradar24 is adhering to best practices, they should have in place adequate logging and monitoring which will help them track down how the breach occurred and what was breached.

"Without knowing details of the attack we can’t speculate about how it was done, however, the attackers may have been most interested in payment card information given that the company offers a commercial service.

"This could potentially fall under the eyes of the PCI Council and Datainspektionen (Swedish supervisory authority), who will be interested to know if the company has done its best to secure its data under the GDPR."



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