German magazine reported Lufthansa’s breach news on Friday which was confirmed by Lufthansa. The spokesperson for Lufthansa told AFP that the the airline “had not been able to prevent illicit access to some customer files” which included data on a number of Lufthansa passengers. The spokesperson said that while some customer information was stolen in the attack , Lufthansa security team“believe to have the problem generally under control” and there was no data stolen from Lufthansa’s system, as only the company’s website at LH.com was compromised in the cyber-attack. According to reports, the unknown hackers used a botnet for hacking Lufthansa. Botnets are generally used for denial of services and distributed denial of service attacks, but in this case the botnet was used for cracking instead of pummeling. The cyber criminals essentially directed the botnet to authenticate with the target website, trying a series of usernames and passwords until a correct combination was achieved. Once they gained the access to the Lufthansa servers, the hackers not only accessed the so-called HON-circle which encompasses frequent flyers in the airline’s Business and First Class, but also what the company referred to as a “small, single-digit number” of their top client’s accounts contained within the HON-circle. Lufthansa security team noticed the intrusion and have changed all of the account information of customers and restored all stolen miles. The airlines has also blocked several hundred accounts as a result of the hack, according to Reuters.
