Indian low-cost airline SpiceJet today informed its customers of an attempted ransomware attack that affected some of its systems and caused delays in flight departures.
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According to the announcement posted on the airline's social media channels, its IT team managed to thwart the attack, so everything is returning to normal operational status.
Many posted photos and videos on Twitter saying they waited for hours after boarding, with no response from the airline.
SpiceJet later said in a statement that the situation had been rectified.
However, numerous customer reports on Twitter and Facebook still reflect ongoing problems, highlighting flight delays, saying that phone customer service is inaccessible and the booking system remains unavailable.
BleepingComputer confirmed at the time of writing that only the SpiceJet homepage was working, while most underlying systems and websites failed to load.
However, flight status tables were accessible and showed massive delays to all destinations checked, ranging from two to five hours.
According to public data, SpiceJet is the second largest airline in India, with a fleet of 102 aircraft serving more than 60 destinations. The company has more than 14,000 employees and holds about 15% of the local market.
Therefore, a cyberattack affecting its operations affects a large number of passengers across India and international destinations and these long delays translate into significant financial losses.
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Previous problem
In January 2020, SpiceJet confirmed a data breach incident that allowed an unauthorized person to access a database backup file on one of the airline's poorly protected servers
The file contained unencrypted information of 1,200,000 passengers who had used SpiceJet services in the previous month, including names , flight details, phone numbers, email addresses and dates of birth .
In 2021, SpiceJet faced severe financial problems due to the grounding of its fleet due to COVID-19, reporting an annual revenue loss of 28%, which directly threatened the viability of its business.
It's easy to assume that this dire economic situation didn't leave much room for investment in cybersecurity and incident response, which could be what allowed ransomware actors to launch a successful attack.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
