A group calling themselves ‘Anonymous Sudan’ claimed responsibility for a cyberattack that took the website of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) offline earlier this week and exfiltrated customer data.
In a statement posted on the airline’s website, the airline said it and “several other companies” were targeted in the attack, taking its website and smartphone app down for several hours.
During the attack, some travelers tried to log into their SAS accounts. discovered Have access to other customer personal information such as name, date of birth, address, email address, previous and future flight details.
Additionally, the last four digits of the customer’s credit card number were displayed.
SAS’ first response was to warn customers not to use the app until the issue was fixed. This is unlikely to reassure the general public, who are concerned that personal information may have fallen into the hands of complete strangers.
Equally unlikely to soothe worried passengers is SAS’ statement that “such attacks often occur in batches, and more are likely to occur in the near future.” bottom.
“However, this should not affect passenger data,” the company said.
The attack came amid a wave of similar cyberattacks against Swedish organizations under the banner of “Anonymous Sudan.” For example, the Swedish healthcare sector recently suffered a number of similar attacks that overloaded their systems with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
A message on Anonymous Sudan’s Telegram channel claimed the attack was in retaliation for anti-Islamic demonstrations in Sweden.
Sure enough, on Valentine’s Day, a cyberattack successfully forced Swedish national television broadcaster SVT to temporarily go off the air.
Although the hacking group chose to use the name “Anonymous Sudan,” some commentators said it was highly likely that the perpetrators of the attack were not actually from Sudan but were part of a Russian campaign. points out that the
SAS said it has notified law enforcement and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of the security incident.
