Security News > 2021 > March > Multiple Airlines Impacted by Data Breach at Aviation IT Firm SITA

SITA, a multinational company that specializes in air transport communications and IT, this week confirmed falling victim to a cyberattack that appears to have impacted multiple airlines around the world.

SITA said on Thursday that the attack, which it described as "Highly sophisticated," affected certain passenger data stored on servers of SITA Passenger Service System Inc., which operates passenger processing systems for airlines.

"After confirmation of the seriousness of the data security incident on February 24, 2021, SITA took immediate action to contact affected SITA PSS customers and all related organizations," the company said in a statement.

Singapore Airlines told customers that it's not a customer of the SITA PSS, but since at least one of the 26 Star Alliance member airlines is a PSS customer, SITA has access to some frequent flyer program data for all Star Alliance airlines.

"All Star Alliance member airlines provide a restricted set of frequent flyer programme data to the alliance, which is then sent on to other member airlines to reside in their respective passenger service systems. This data transfer is necessary to enable verification of the membership tier status, and to accord to member airlines' customers the relevant benefits while travelling," Singapore Airlines explained.

Singapore Airlines said roughly 580,000 members of its KrisFlyer and PPS programs are affected by the breach at SITA. Based on the notifications sent by impacted airlines to their customers, only information such as name, tier status and membership number has been compromised.

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