Casual Approach during Travel – Cyber Attacks in Travel Industry

We all know we cannot do without internet, it’s like bread and butter. We use it for paying bills, online shopping, sharing documents, photos, videos to friends and family, for promotion of business, making any bank transactions, increasing our knowledge and skills and many others. As a layman we use internet so casually just like using the free wi-fi during business travel to complete important presentation. Little do we know that this important presentation can be hacked by attackers as public wi-fis are not secured and important information like business data, bank account details, phone numbers, emails can easily be leaked.

It is so alarming to know that approximately 421 million records were breached in the month of October-2019. Some of the prominent examples are Aadhar details of 6.7 Mn users containing details such as names, addresses and numbers were leaked on Indane LPG’s website. Some others were Justdial’s database was leaked of over 100 Mn users, Indian Army which has most sensitive information of the country also had reported breaching of data, it received 23 cyber-attacks in the year 2019 and many others. So, we can say that in the digital space our identity can be breached at any moment.

Do you know travel and transportation industry is the 2nd most targeted industry for cyber-attacks in the year 2018, as mentioned by IBM customers. In todays scenario we are interconnected with each other as any happenings in the world has an impact on the countries. This leads to the fact that cyber risk is increasing in all the countries and as per Quick Heal report through the year 2019 India witnessed 973 million cyber-attacks were registered on Windows Devices in past one year and Trojans were considered to be the major cause for downloading unauthorised softwares in the devices. While on Android devices unwanted applications, forged/duplicate/malicious apps are considered to be the major source of cyber attack. This gives rise to device insecurity as the major cause of concern as the losses that can arise due to cyber attack is leaps and bounds.

• Loss of confidential information to competitors or other peer employees.
• Loss of revenue if the customer orders go to competitors.
• Replacement cost incurred due to damage to device application or software’s.
• Damage of reputation because employee/organisation did not secure private information of customer.

Therefore let us find out ways in which private or business information can be prevented from cyber thefts:-

• Reset all the passwords of business email id, login id, ATM passwords and others while you are travelling. Also, one should not use easy passwords like ABCD, birthdates, individual names etc which can be easily guessed by attackers.
• Leave your personal data at home, by disabling the sync option in your laptop so that there is no important data left in the laptop during travel. All the updates and edits will be done in cloud and while you come back again enable the local cache.
• Install Anti-Virus software’s, host based firewall, host intrusion prevention software. Make sure that you use trusted brand security software and update it as and when new versions become available to make sure all security patches are applied. Network sharing feature needs to be turned off.
• You should lock your device while not using it, in this way breaching of information will not take place even if you have misplaced the device.
• Disable Bluetooth connectivity because attackers can hack your phone by connecting to your phone through Bluetooth on.
• Do not share your current location on social media, this will give chance to the attackers to easily know your location and hack your device.
• Study the security laws in the country you are travelling so that you can plan beforehand how much data is to be kept in your device and how much to be kept confidential.
• Setup temporary email account and cloud storage account when you are required to use business centre computers as they can easily fall prey to malware