These days it’s relatively simple to plan out a whole trip through a number of travel booking websites and aggregators. While this has certainly helped make one part of traveling less stressful, a new research from Security Research Labs (SR Labs) is shedding light on just how poorly the systems that they rely on are protected. The problem is not with the travel booking websites themselves, but with the fact that the three major global distribution systems (GDS) used to manage the majority of travel reservations — Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport — reportedly lack any kind of secure authentication.
Speaking at the 33rd annual Chaos Communication Congress, the largest European computer security conference, researchers Karsten Nohl and Nemanja Nikodijevic demonstrated that with nothing more than your six-digit passenger name record (PNR), which is used globally to store flight reservations, a hacker could steal your airline miles, gain access to your personal information, cancel flights, and more.
These credentials are assigned by airlines and can be easily found on people’s’ luggage tags or boarding passes along with the traveler’s last name. These two data pieces are often enough to access and manage travel records on airline and mileage program websites. It doesn’t help that thousands of people actually post pictures of their boarding pass online as a ‘humble brag’ while waiting to board their plane.
Moreover, even if making an effort to conceal your PNR, the number and types of characters that can be used for this record must fall within a predetermined range, making it easier for hackers to target a specific last name and run through all the possibilities until they find a match. The researchers demonstrated this by reassigning a reporter to a seat next to a politician on a real flight.
“No matter where you book your flights, no matter what airline you fly, they all share similar issues. There’s no access control, no way to authenticate travelers, and no logging to track abuse,” the researchers claim.
They have notified the three main GDS systems of their findings and expect that some of the holes in the systems will be fixed soon, although others might require a deeper changes in how the system works.

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A total of 71% of global businesses are now gathering internet of things (IoT) data in some form or other, and 90% expect to increase spending over the next 12 months, according to a report produced by analysts at 451 Research.
Its latest study of 1,000 enterprise IT buyers from around the world, entitled Voice of the Enterprise: IoT Organisational Dynamics , revealed that businesses were pushing ahead with IoT initiatives and spending to support them. Those with initiatives already underway expected to increase their spending by 33% over the next 12 months.
The study said deployments and usage would be strongest around data and transactional intensive workloads, such as data analytics and security, with IoT-specific projects likely to include analysis of financial, healthcare and industrial functions, uptime and reliability of IT equipment, and monitoring efficiency and costs.
According to the statistics, 68% of enterprises were taking advantage of IoT data for operational optimisation, and 42% to develop new products or enhance existing ones.
The analysts also identified a distinct proportion of IoT transitions occurring without departmental oversight, as IT systems, networks and infrastructures “naturally” became IoT-enabled by intelligent sensing and analytics capabilities that now come baked into IT hardware.
“When it comes to IoT adoption, pragmatism rules,” said Laura DiDio, report author and research director at 451 Research.
“The survey data indicates enterprises currently use IoT for practical technology purposes that have an immediate and tangible impact on daily operational business efficiencies, economies of scale and increasing the revenue stream,” she said.
When it came to the risks associated with the IoT, security was predictably at the top of the list , with 50% of report respondents considering it the main impediment to successful IoT deployment.
A total of 41% cited a perceived lack of return of investment (ROI). Still others were concerned about a perceived skills shortage, with 46% saying they were having difficulty filling IoT-related positions, although 54% said that a lack of IoT-trained staff was not a problem for them.

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Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers may be near the bottom of their unprecedented crash in user share, measurements published Sunday show.
Analytics vendor Net Applications reported that the user share of IE and Edge — an estimate of the proportion of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — dropped by seven-tenths of a percentage point in December, falling to a combined 26.2%.
That seven-tenths of a point decline was notable because it was less than half that of the browsers’ average monthly reductions over the last 12, six and three months, which were 1.9, 1.8 and 1.5 points, respectively. The slowly-shrinking averages over the three different spans supported the idea that IE and Edge may be reaching rock bottom.
Microsoft’s browser collapse has been unparalleled. In 2016, IE and Edge — Net Applications pours their user share into the same “bucket” — shed 20.1 points, representing 43% of its December 2015 share. No other browser has bled that much user share that quickly, with the possible exception of Netscape Navigator in the 1990s.
The disintegration was triggered when Microsoft stopped supporting all but the newest browsers — IE11 and Edge — in January 2016. Microsoft’s early end of support for some versions of IE gave users a choice of upgrading to a newer edition of Internet Explorer, upgrading to Windows 10 and adopting Edge, or dumping IE for a competitor. Millions did the latter.
Using Net Applications’ data for browser and operating system user share, as well as Microsoft’s claim that about 1.5 billion PCs run Windows worldwide, Computerworld put the debacle in terms of millions of users. At 2016’s end, IE and Edge were being run by about 428 million users, down a remarkable 370 million for the year. On the bright side, December’s loss of approximately 15 million users was the smallest in 2016.
The biggest beneficiary of IE + Edge’s decline last month was Google’s Chrome, which climbed by six-tenths of a percentage point to 56.4%, a record high.
But Mozilla’s Firefox was also rewarded in December. By Net Applications’ accounting, Firefox boosted its user share by three-tenths of a percentage point to 12.2%, the highest share throughout 2016.
Although Firefox was on a downward spiral of its own earlier in the year, it began a come-back in September. During the year’s final four months, Firefox’s share rose by 4.5 percentage points, an amazing recovery from what in the summer appeared to be the open-source browser’s final death throes.
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