Back in 2018, Sharon received an unsolicited offer from American Airlines to upgrade her to Platinum Pro. At the time, this was a great offer for us. We had flights booked on American using Avios and this status would allow us to pick Main Cabin Extra seats at no extra charge. Having status made these flights on American tolerable and maybe even enjoyable.
However, was that upgrade worth the hassle and possible security risk of having our account info hacked through a third-party processor? Probably not.
If you haven’t heard, SITA, a company that among other things aviation-related, helps with the sharing of passenger loyalty status between airlines suffered a rather significant hack of its data systems involving the names, frequent flyer numbers and loyalty status of passengers. This resulted in a flurry of emails to members of loyalty programs, some who didn’t even directly deal with SITA, to alert them of a possible security breach.
Sharon was the recipient of one of those emails.
To date, American Airlines is the only one to contact either Sharon or me about the SITA data breach. It appears that the weak link was the sharing between BA and AA of Sharon’s status for our one flight using Avios. This is my assumption because American also gave me the status that I used for AA flights, but those flights were paid for by my employer and American Airlines didn’t share my loyalty status with British Airways (assumingly through SITA.)
Was there anything I could do to prevent us from this hack? Probably not. The only thing that put us at risk was using frequent flyer points to book a partner airline flight. Sure, there are some risks involved in this practice, but I never included my loyalty info getting stolen as one of them. Will this keep me from using the sweet spots as long as the programs allow them to exist? Of course not.
It will mean I’ll keep using strong passwords for all of my loyalty program accounts and that I’ll probably update them a little more frequently than I did before. Thank goodness for password manager applications.
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#stayhealthy #staysafe #washyourhands #wearamask
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
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