Vietnam Airlines Data Breach
haveibeenpwned.com
haveibeenpwned.com
That is very small solace when you're the victim, regardless of the failures of others. "But you shouldn't be using that data as validation!" is not the first response when say, you find out someone's opened a credit card in your name with a $20K balance. Or your friends & family get phished (especially with the help of AI) because they know so much about you it had to be you.
You are attacking a straw man here.
> Dates of birth, Email addresses, Loyalty program details, Names, Phone numbers
Seems like a salesforce leak. Not to single out sales force here. Could easily be fill in the ____ big corp. When are people going to get there is no absolute digital security. And at currently state, it is much more secure to NOT have all the data aggregated in one place. Of course this would go against the data mining operation. We should look at this from a perspective that benefits the user in the long term.
Server/relay should be very thin layer NOT storing any identifiable info about the user except for public keys. All other info should be stored locally where ONLY the user has access to them.
HIBP links to [1], which links to [2], which says
>The FBI last week warned airlines in the US that the group was targeting the aviation sector. In a post on X, the FBI said the group uses social engineering techniques, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access, and bypassing multi-factor authentication.
So it sounds like phishing attacks against the individual airlines. It sounds pretty much the same as [3], which goes into detail of the exact mechanism that phishers can use to steal Salesforce data. It does sound like it is a little bit Salesforce's fault, because Salesforce's UI makes it really easy to grant an attacker access to your database without realizing it. Salesforce needs to improve the permission granting UI so that it's clearer what is going on.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/11/hackers-lea...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/02/qantas-conf...
[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/voi...
> Insurance giant Allianz Life, Google, fashion conglomerate Kering, the airline Qantas, carmaking giant Stellantis, credit bureau TransUnion, and the employee management platform Workday, among several others, have confirmed their data was stolen in these mass hacks.
Perhaps it's bad security defaults which are in some sense user error, but when it becomes common pattern then I think the company needs to make systematic fixes.
Compare with many Snowflake customers getting hacked.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/03/hacking-group-claims-theft...
1 email to my sister going "I have hacked into your computer and know xyz I'll spill your secrets unless you pay" was enough to make her freak out. It's all stuff that can be obtained from these leaks.
Vietnam is particularly bad with breaches. For like 25 cents you can send a telegram bot a phone number and it will immediately reply with DOB, ID number, Home Address, Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles. I know this because everyone gets a freebie and I tested it out.
Scam calls are a lot more credible when rather than starting with "Hello, this is Microsoft calling. There is a problem with your computer." you get a call like:
"Hello Mr. zkmon, this is Mallory from MasterCard. I'm calling to verify a recent, suspicious transaction from your card to Vietnam Airlines on August 6th. We just want to make sure that was you and your card is not being misused. Before we do that can we please quickly verify your identity? I see here in our system that you're born in 1996. Can you please tell me your exact birth date so I can be sure I'm really talking to Mr. zkmon?"
Bonus points when the breach contains what bank you are at so they can pretend to be them.
Also such databreaches are useful for stalking people or tracking people down with very little information and then doxing them etc. Say all you have is an online username of someone you don't like, so you just search a database of leaks for that string. From there you get an email address and full name. And from there you can continue searching other breaches with those details and using other public sources.
In isolation, ok, you have just your personal data like birthdate, name, phone number leaked just based on an email.
But now that there was so many leaks, just taking a single email, you can easily map an important part of the profile of a person. Give me an email, I now have: - All identification details, sometimes scanned id documents - linkedin details about the professional details of a person, which company when, ... - Even without the clear official address, you can have an average estimation of where the person live by looking at the countries or location of breached companies. - I can see with leak of big and small retailers like CostCo where the person is doing is shopping. Sometimes it can be worse for specialized retailers, like knowing that you might be vegetarian, or like buying electronic products. - With telecom providers breachs, you know the internet and mobile provider of a person, you can also discover that the person has multiple phone and mobile lines. - With leaks of forum and so, you can see if a user is into specific topics. - With things like leaks of airline providers like that, you can know if the person is a frequent flyers, might be a frequent visitor of some countries or area of the world as companies are often highly linked with their HQ country base. - You might also know that a person is frequently living in another place/country than its official residence ...
To be fair, I don't think it's made a huge difference in my life. In fact it's possibly been more of a negative than a positive.
And now, my data is open-source ಠ_ಠ
Maybe if the US was willing to perform an air strike on each business that violated CAN-SPAM we'd get some real compliance.
Vietnam Airlines once somehow managed to email me the boarding pass of another person due to fly with them the following day. I'd provided an email address to their sales agent when booking a flight on a different route some nine years earlier (back in the good old days of 2009 when they didn't have newfangled stuff like online booking), and didn't even have a remotely similar name to the individual whose boarding pass they'd sent me. I hope they didn't miss their flight! (yes, I emailed back, copying in some customer service addresses that definitely weren't no-reply...)
I'm not an expert in airline PSS systems, but I know one thing - that isn't supposed to happen :)
And when governments try to plug up some of the loopholes when it comes to privacy and data sharing, every major company finds some new gap to exploit or just does it illegally without telling anybody until they get found out and pay the fine.
Also helps in tracking misbehaving websites that sells/leaks your emails or subject your email with excessive spam. I recall Stack Social is one of the worst offenders.
For those that don't know, Qantas stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Airline Service.