Australian airline giant Qantas said Wednesday it had experienced a data breaches that damaged the personal information of at least 6 million passengers.
The airline said on June 30, cybercriminals targeted one of the call centers and stole customer data from the system, including their name, email address, phone number, date of birth and frequent flyer numbers.
Qantas is the latest airline to be hacked in recent weeks following a spurt of violations caused by scattered spiders, a collection of hackers and tactics that are highly skilled at invading large corporations' networks. Canadian airline Westjet suffered a data breach in June. This is linked to spiders scattered with media coverage. Hawaiian Airlines also said last week it was suffering from a data breach.
Google's security unit Mandiant told TechCrunch on Wednesday that it was “too early to tell” whether Qantas Hack was linked to scattered spiders, but warned that airlines should be “high warnings” due to social engineering attacks.