Customer and employee data breached in American Airlines phishing attack

Threat actors managed to compromise several work email accounts of American Airlines employees that held personally identifiable of customers and workers, the airline has disclosed.

The carrier said the attackers used a phishing campaign to gain access to its team member’s accounts. The data breach was discovered on July 5, and according to a letter sent to impacted customers on Sept. 16, there is currently no evidence of misuse of data.

"In July 2022 we discovered that an unauthorized actor compromised the email accounts of a limited number of American Airlines team members," the letter reads. "Upon discovery of the incident, we secured the applicable email accounts and engaged a third party cybersecurity forensic firm to conduct a forensic investigation to determine the nature and the scope of the incident."

Sensitive information exposed

Despite not sharing the number of impacted individuals or company employees, Andrea Koos, a Senior Manager for Corporate Communications at American Airlines, told BleepingComputer that only “a very small number of customers and employees’ personal information was contained in those [compromised] email accounts.

The information potentially accessed and stolen during the attack, according to the notification letter, included names, dates of birth, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, driver's license numbers, passport numbers, and certain medical information of both customers and employees.

In response to the breach, the airline says it will offer affected customers free access to credit monitoring services and advises caution against unsolicited correspondence, whether by phone or email.

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