British Airways among Latest Targets of Cyberattacks
British Airway’ air-miles accounts, the coding site GitHub and work chat service Slack have all been targeted in the latest wave of cyberattacks, according to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The BBC said that the companies affected have informed their users of the incidents, with complaints about points being stolen from BA’s Executive Club scheme dating back two weeks or more.
One BA customer said that their account had been used by someone to book a hotel room in Spain, while others claimed that their list of transactions showed “ex-gratia” deductions that had wiped out their entire credit.
A BA spokesman said that the airline believed that only “a small number” of its frequent flyers were affected.
“This appears to have been the result of a third party using information obtained elsewhere on the internet, via an automated process, to try to gain access to some accounts,” he said.
“We would like to reassure customers that, at this stage, we are not aware of any access to any subsequent information pages within accounts, including travel histories or payment card details.”
The attack on San Francisco-based GitHub, used by more than 8m software developers, involved an attempt to knock its site offline by flooding it with traffic. “We are currently experiencing the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in GitHub’s history,” systems engineer Jesse Newland wrote on its blog.